FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| CD REVIEWS THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS · Not a new album of Chemical tracks, but a DJ mix album by the dancefloor destroyin' duo. · It's a big beat party in a tiny plastic package! While the Chemical Brothers's albums are just okay and the songs on their own quite good, they've pretty much, as yet, failed to show the rest of the world how they got so damn huge. Until now. Brother's Gonna Work It Out is chock-full of the blockin'est rockin'est beats and a barrage of booty shakin' bass. From the way the title tune (from the soundtrack to 1973's "The Mack") slides effortlessly into tripped-out breakbeat, you know that these guys don't so much break boundaries as not have a clue (or care) that they're there. Electro, house, acid, disco, breakbeat and techno all get twisted up in the punchy style their music is known for, with real-time sampling and looping to change songs into new trax practically on the spot. That's why this is a DJ album that delivers on the promise of not just simply sticking track over track, but using technology to tweak them into something almost entirely new. But what the hell does that really matter anyway? This isn't an album to analyze. It's an album to rattle your rump to. Period. 4/5 Elvis Costello with Burt Bacharach · Twelve new songs written together in one of the oddest collaborations in musical history · Over 80 musicians worked on the record A funny thing happened when Elvis Costello met Burt Bacharach. In a Hollywood studio, punk's visceral angry young man came face to face with the king of the '70s penthouse set and together they laid their hearts on the line in 12 new songs. The songs the two created are some of the saddest and most forlorn Costello has ever sung. Longing for loves that got away, or should have, Costello croons tunes refined by his new friend, the old master of pop. But just when your being sucked in by the tenderness, Bacharach spoils the mood with a maraschino cherry dropped into Costello's last-call double scotch. Burt Bacharach may have brought out the best in Elvis, but ultimately he brings out too much of himself. The melodies, arrangments and phrasing are unparralled in Costello's catalogue, yet somehow the record as a whole would have been better if Bacharach's contribution ended at songwriter and arranger - as a producer he leaves Costello a master stranded at a karaoke lounge. Love, however, makes fools of us all, and the strength of these songs can be enough to seduce the most hardened romantic. 3/5 JOHN MELLENCAMP · Guns N' Roses AWOL guitarist, Izzy Stradlin, appears on this album, as does violin goddess Lisa Germano. Educational critic Neil Postman wrote about the dummying down of the North American mind. Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451, traced a fictional but likely journey in which the guardians of the politically correct removed offensive words and phrases until anything that could spark emotion vanished, and a pabulum of soft words and softer thinking remained. Now John Cougar - er, sorry, that's Mellencamp, seeing as he's figured out who he is - creates porridge of his own on this self-titled album. It's obvious that he feels he's elevated his thoughts from the days he wore a pink lamé tuxedo on the American Music Awards and lip-synched his way through "Ain't Even Done With the Night," but at least then he was honest. He was Hit Boy. He was a commercial rocker searching for fame and the almighty dollar. Nothing wrong with that, especially if your music was as good as his was, considering what was out there in Top Fortyland at the time. But mercifully he had no aspirations of something grander, as he so obviously does now. From the real deep message of "It All Comes True," in which Mellencamp writes from the perspective of a black man growing up on the streets of Chicago ("The chains around the playground/ Were the chains around my heart" - barfity barf-barf!) to "Eden is Burning," in which he reprises perennial favorite song characters Jack and Diane and freezes them in the agony of a relationship that far outlived its love, it's obvious Mellencamp is trying to be deeper than Monica Lewinsky's throat. And musically, he sticks to that rootsy, open-American-road sound he mastered long ago, and his players are crackshot musicians. But kid yourself not, this album isn't the milestone on the musical landscape it's obvious he would like it to be - it's only Bruce Springsteen for the thinking impaired. 2/5 MERCURY REV · Fourth full-length album from innovators of '90s American neo-classical psychedelia is a departure from the cacophonic experimentalism of previous efforts. · Features the talents of The Band's Levon Helm and Grant Hudson. Behind heavy lids lies a peek-through-the-clouds view of a cartoon house on a hill. Relax, cut the strings with your scissorhands and float through the warm blue darkness and down slowly into its quiet cobwebbed belly, guided only by memory and the soft and friendly glow of unknown origin. At the foot of a long staircase you land and liquefy, your smile floating like gasoline on top of the pool that is you. The glow intensifies as you flow upstairs to the sound of your dreams - timeless, peaceful fairy-tale instrumentation heard inside a million minds. In the last room, at the back of the house you find the glow sitting with a grin that rains sunshine inside of your smile. You gulp it down as strings giddily tinkle, theremins weep, organs haunt and stormy percussion cascades down the side of the house and across the painted glass windows. Content and absorbed, you feel a tug, a hook inside the beautiful bubble that yanks you violently back up through the clouds and hurtles you a million miles an hour towards the daylight and a world unkind to the peace of dreams. Banging on your lids you feel the paranoid mare behind you pushing everything - music, emotions, security - over the edge as it claws its way inside the walls and begins to snip at the wiring. Suddenly - eyes open, all ebbs away. Only to be dreamed again another day. 5/5 PJ HARVEY · Fifth album from Ms. Polly Jean Harvey. · Produced by Harvey with help from Flood and Head. On the liner notes, the carefully typed lyrics, obfuscated by a reproduction of handwritten scrawls in purple and red pen, are the first hint that Polly Harvey has attempted to rewrite her version of herself. The booklet features the obligatory photo of Harvey in a brassiere in purely non-sexual terrain, and many pictures of Harvey staring back at the camera from eyes that reveal all the excitement of a traveller whose flight to Mexico has been snowed in at Denver for 14 hours - pure boredom bordering on indifference. A pastel of Joseph leading Mary on her ass is also paneled in. The music which the booklet is wrapped around echoes the visual layout. Harvey prefers singing through a voice so restrained it often mimics boredom compared to the passionate caterwauling that tore up her previous albums. The music, too, is usually quietly understated, sounding at times like it was piped in from the soundtrack of some underground sex movie made in the '70s. As for the religious imagery, well, Harvey's lyrics, still full of images of betrayal, sin and reward, create their own brand of religious iconography. Trouble is, most of the time the music isn't quite up to the content. 3/5 GOLDEN SMOG · Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, Soul Asylum's Dan Murphy, and Gary Louris and Marc Perlman of the Jayhawks combine their talents once again on this follow-up to 1995's Down By the Old Mainstream. · Big Star drummer Jody Stephens makes his Golden Smog debut. What is it about straining existence through the uneven filter of morning following a night when you never found your bed, never found sleep? Underground supergroup Golden Smog diffuse that feeling, that sound, into almost every one of these 15 tracks, creating a morning-after menagerie of life reflections in song, reflections about how "It was a drag to be dragging/ You down the hall 'til you came to," reflections of the faces of regret and heartbreak covered in the makeup of pleasure and wealth, reflections of lovers that "...welcome you with broken arms." The styles may range from sparse acoustic ballads to jugular guitar rip 'n' roll, but there is the same timeless quality that is echoed in the works of The Jayhawks and, going a little farther back, as one listener exclaimed first time through, "Holy Byrds!" The songs never quite run free, but instead seem guided by the hand of the past, with shadows of country, folk and old-time rock skulking along for the trip. It's a comfortable album, not without flaws, perhaps made richer by them, and definitely not without abundant charms. 4/5 SON VOLT · Third album from ex-Uncle Tupelo member Jay Farrar. Yeah, sure rodeo's a gauche sport and none of you would ever watch it, but you know that moment when the gate swings open and some finely tuned, rippling-muscled and half-feral paint horse goes off like an A-bomb and the cowboy's wearing shit so fast that you know there's some justice in this world? That's like Son Volt, the way they fire up on track one in a wedding made of poetry and distortion, all tough-cut guitars and sinister vocals, and they throw you on your ass into the shit of life. And you stay there 'cause organic ain't so bad after everything's been scrubbed clean once too often for you to properly feel anything anymore. And organic this is - beautifully cultured, splitting open ideas and melodies to expose the bacteria of modern living that feasts on our souls at night while we sleep, feeding oxygen to passion and hope, making them catch fire. This is the sound of driving 500 miles down the highway, seeing city lights and barbed wire go by in a blur of sleepless hours, then stopping and climbing over a split rail fence to sit in a newly mown hay field and look at the North Star, wondering always about your own direction and whether everything will meet up at the center, or maybe fall away into merciful ceaseless creeping rot. Sometimes these country-flavored melodies go slow and caress you soft and easy as your lover's tongue, other times they're driven and hard - and that ain't such a bad way to be touched either - depending on what you need, but the important thing is they're touching you, always touching you somehow and you never go numb. 5/5 THE JON SPENCER BLUES EXPLOSION · Recorded in six different studios with a jaw-dropping roster of folks who helped out including: Calvin Johnson, Steve Albini, T Ray (Cypress Hill), Cristina Martinez (Jon's wife and fellow Boss Hog conspirator) and Jill Cunniff (Luscious Jackson). · The best JSBX record ever covers gospel, country, rock 'n' roll, hip hop, blues and soul genres with scorching great taste. If 16 Magazine, Bop or Teenbeat ever went indie-rock, the superfoxy Jon Spencer would be on the cover every month - hands down. Guys and gals would be taking scrupulous notes on what His Royal Hotness looks for in a guitar and a date. He's cooler than the Fonz and Vinnie Barbarino, but is as on-fire as James Brown and Hound Dog Taylor. Hell, before he's done, Jon Spencer may become our generation's Elvis Presley. Acme is the latest heatwave from Spencer and the Blues Explosion (Judah Bauer on guitar, Russell Simins on the skins). It's a spicy 45-minute shing-a-ling-a-ling voyage through X-rated hip rockin' hop that never disappoints. The turbo-powered trio explode like a plump Pizza Pop with rhythm and blues juices squirting all over the place. Spencer, as usual, is provocatively stationed at the helm and suavely guides the groove locomotive through fiery terrain without running out of steam or derailing. Rock is in JSBX's blood. It courses through their veins like oxygen in ways that other Spencer projects like Pussy Galore and Boss Hog don't convey. With Acme - a groundbreaking album that sounds like the band nursed steadily on Tabasco sauce throughout the recording - JSBX have proven that they are the indisputable "It" clique from the school of cool. Fire extinguishers and 100 fire trucks couldn't possibly put an end to this blazing Delta blues-rock inferno. 5/5 SWOON · Three-piece band on California's "sub-jazz" label Curve. · Their sound centers heavily on guitar with nearly noddable narcotic beats. The Californian labels Resist and Curve release music in what they call the "sub-jazz" genre. Most of the artists are accomplished jazz musicians who are into today's electronic music. Rarely just doing something as lame as sticking a sax solo over a dusty old hip hop break, most of these artists (such as Subjazz Proxy, Morpheus Quintet and Wait For Nothing) bring those elements into their contexts and mold them to their needs. Swoon is no different. Sounding as if Robert Fripp joined Tortoise, who were then produced by Dmitri From Paris with James Lavelle, it's a mellow melange of music designed chiefly to chill out to, and despite the comparisons to the aforementioned artists, it doesn't descend into the depths of self-indulgence. The songs all average around the three-minute mark so they finish what they're doing, and even though the band have their sonic formula down flat, the songs aren't. Far from two-dimensional, these tracks have a sense of space and depth that permeates them and, in turn, you. This is an album meant for those quiet moments of contemplation. Whether you're in a candlelit bath or stuck inside on a grey winter day, this is definitely a disc you'd want to play. 4/5 A TRIBE CALLED QUEST · Fifth and final album from the New York hip hop trio. · Guest appearances include Busta Rhymes, Redman, Noreaga, and Mos Def. So ends another chapter in the legendary Native Tongue saga. Ending not with a bang, but with a whimper, Tribe has called it quits just a few albums too late. There's no denying the contributions to hip hop made by Q-Tip (the Abstract Poet), Phife Dog (the Five-Foot Assassin) and Ali Shaheed Muhammad over the nine-year span of Tribe's existence - their fusion of jazz and hip hop, their top-notch wordplay and lyrical skills, and their sense of humor. On The Love Movement, we hear little evidence of the inspired effort that made them a rarity in the rap genre: favorites of the commercial hip hoppers, but of the underground, as well. Save for tracks like "Like It Like That" and "Pad & Pen," Q-Tip sounds disinterested on this recording (his fat-ass crib was burned down earlier this year, if that is a reasonable excuse). His rhyming is spectacular, as usual, but if there's anyone who might literally be able to rap on the 4/4 in his sleep, it's Tip. The Love Movement, by default, is more a vehicle for Phife's talents, and although he is able to carry much of the weight of the album on his diminutive shoulders, it was the tag team rapping between Tip and Phife from track to track that made their albums memorable. Perhaps being able to demonstrate their immense talent at a consistently high level for their first three (landmark) albums has spoiled listeners. By anyone else's standards, The Love Movement is a respectable effort. But we're talking about one of the finest acts that hip hop has produced, which means there's a standard by which Tribe is to be measured, and there's a standard by which others are measured. Now where did I put my copy of Low End Theory? 2/5 |