Reviews by verlainemorrison96

'Only clowns would play w/ those balloons.' Electronic folk, & the magic of the British Isles, Goldfrapp is 1/3 Joan Baez, 1/3 Kate Bush, & 1/3 Cocteau Twins. That's wispy business, but these gossamer tunes take flight w/ just the right amount of softness that I have a good time listening to the record. 'We'll be swimming in the sea / Of wisdom & serenity.' Unlike the Cocteau Twins, this group often flaunts lyrics you can actually understand, which is not always a good thing: odd clichés seem to come out of nowhere. +, tho not as egregiously, Alison has a bit of that Beth Gibbons faux cabaret thing going on. Beauty, however fleeting that may be, ends up saving the album from itself. So go ahead, listen to it, lean into your craving for the beautiful.

Faces strikes me as an efficient & potent amalgam of The Rolling Stones & Creedence, boasting the pub rock sound of the former & the heartlandia of the latter. This is good music, the kind we need in the world - that we get for cheap, that we keep coming back to in the end b/c it scratches an itch & offers a vigorous simplicity. Stewart's still an underrated vocalist, & Lane does a more than competent job adding a pinch o' Dylan to the mix. 'Why! They're playing "Tracks Of My Tears".' Clearly in love w/ rock 'n' roll, plain & simple, Faces only falters to the extent that their calories are at times as empty as the vacancy they don't really fill. Others have done a better job w/ this sort of product. No matter tho, A Nod Is As Good As gets my vote.

'I said goodbye to the ground.' Better than I remember it being, but all that talking is a real drag & a panic that I can do w/o. Renowned for their weird, punishing time signatures, I don't care for those b/c I honestly don't really notice them: if they upset musical convention, good for them, or not, it's the same to me either way. What I hear most of all are McMahan's vocals, which are in the rare instance urgent & explosive, especially in the finality - 'I miss you / I miss you / Ah, I miss you / I miss you' - but are usually misery manifest in whispers & bad poetry. 'He decided to piss / But he couldn't.' I feel I relate to the fuckers in the gorge on the cover, I do, but I also want to tell them, 'hey guys, lighten up, get a sense of humor, or just a sense at all.'

Electronic music is, by definition, indulgent, & there's a fine & obscure line between a salubrious indulgence & one that mostly hits all the wrong notes whilst leaving you empty & emptied. Darkdancer, tho it starts often decent, satisfies the latter description, a record that offers no hope, no health, & no purpose. I'm more ambivalent about electro-pop than I am about any other genre in that I know almost immediately if I'm into it or if I can't stand it. I don't have much to say about this album: it fails somatically b/c it extends no bridge to the body & it fails cognitively b/c I can't imagine this guy doing anything interesting in the studio. The only thing I can dig is the cover art, which is distinctly turn-of-the-century-esqe. Mostly, I'll keep my distance.

There's old school hip-hop, from Run-DMC to Rakim & Kool G Rap, & then there's the really old school: Whodini, Sugar Hill Gang, Grandmaster Flash. It's not only a matter of appreciating the pioneering acts that has me loving this record - the music has to be good, I don't care how influential it is. It's the fact that, from another perspective, this is the best musical about New York City this side of West Side Story. You can call it cinematic, but that's not exactly right. It's more like choreographed insight into social reality, & I don't just mean the classic title track. W/ the exception of 'Dreamin',' their odd but touching tribute to Stevie Wonder, & 'You Are,' a random, gospel-inspired track, every song here adds to a pretty deep conception of NYC.

What's there to elaborate here? As the title makes clear, this record boasts the talents of three of the most beloved country gals of the 20th century, & it's a quiet, slamming perfection. 'I'm making plans to be lonesome.' Like a soundtrack to a soundtrack, in other words, like music that tells the story of itself, the album flows from track to track, making a world w/o cracks or any wrong note, tho the songs, being true to their country-folk origins, manifest our cracking, troubled humanities. I guess what I love about music like this is its Beckettian sensibility: when you feel you've given up, all you have to do is look around & you see that you haven't. 'I just never belonged, I just longed to be gone / So the garden one day set me free.' Life in a nutshell.

Rhyming 'perimeter fence' w/ 'senseless' & 'regiment,' 'bruise' w/ 'leather shoes' & 'bad mood music,' 'trophies' w/ 'hope is' or 'sofa' w/ 'oaf' proves that Costello is still at the peak of his powers in '94 & that it's essentially a given that you'll get at least some lyrical mastery from the bloke. Mastery doesn't make a great record tho. Great songs do. Brutal Youth has several tracks that are almost great, including 'This is Hell,' 'Still Too Soon to Know,' 'Rocking Horse Road,' & 'All the Rage,' but nothing as instantly great as something off This Year's Model. It's a record of virtuosity w/ pockets of poignancy, not an album that makes you feel all that much in the end, tho I wouldn't call it cold exactly. There's just nothing blazingly immediate here.

'Pa, send me money now / I'm gonna make it somehow.' I don't know why, but that lines makes me think of Barbra Streisand's rendition of Funny Girl, that '68 classic about oddball Fanny Brice's rise to self-deprecated fame. Anyhow, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is stunning, capturing that Neil Young ability to be absolutely commonplace, to be utterly rock 'n' roll, & to be seriously heartbreaking. A line such as the following essentially renders the entire project a rousing success, but there's really so much here that's luminous: 'How the hours will bend / Through the time that you spend / Til you turn to your eyes / & you see your best friend / Looking over the end.' As I've said before, Young is a one-off, someone we're still catching up w/.

Ric Ocasek's vocals have the same shouty and nasal pitch as David Byrne & Tom Verlaine, but The Cars are far closer in nature to Blondie & The Go-Gos than they are to the Talking Heads or Television, which means that this isn't deep music - it's not even deep pop music - b/c it's pop & nothing more. Blondie reached perfection once w/ 'just pop music' on Parallel Lines, & it's been done before & since, but it's not an easy thing to pull off, at least from 1970 onward. The Cars don't quite reach pop perfection on this debut, tho they get damn close. The two geniuses are Elliot Easton & David Robinson - the lead guitar is as rockin' as anything while the drums thump & pump. I love this most: at times, you'd swear you were listening to the Allman Bros.

'Remember when we both first felt the world is sound, the world is sound?' Like much else here, that's the sort of line that weds the profound to the joyous - the vast to the satisfied - & makes a happy project like this more than happy. I've always felt that it's harder to make art that's unabashedly joyful than it is to be steeped in negativism: you have to work thru more problems. But tho this isn't The Rascals, DeBarge, or the Pet Shop Boys' Very, In Our Heads succeeds to the extent that it teaches us to be in better moods. 'Won't you come back to my heart / There's something I'm trying to say.' It also bares out mysteries in the forms of memories, introducing the listener to some sort of inner world. & yet, it's also just dance music.

Brits can't pull off blue-eyed soul, which doesn't mean there aren't soulful acts in British music history, but that when it comes to an intentional brand of white-boy soul, how about we stick to America, deal? Worse, these cats think they're a jazz act as well, something in the vein of Eddie Harris & Les McCann, Cannonball Adderley, or Lou Donaldson, but they're just the cafe w/o the substance. 'The gift you gave is desire / The match that started my fire.' This is worse than pretentious, tho there's certainly a patina of a too-cool here, & it's worse than sincere, tho the lyrics are saccharine & boring. Primarily, it's empty & it's drool. Like, if I ever met Weller, Talbot, or White, I would be more confounded than annoyed: so cheesy/corny it's confusing.

An electronic record that tells a story is as rare as a prog album that won't get on your nerves, but somehow The Prodigy's second release is just this, even or especially if that story is up to our own imaginations. It's actually impossible not to be distracted while listening to this thing, so one doesn't exactly take in the story as one continuous stream, but distraction is a part of this album's design: if you've gone somewhere else, that's the point, is it not? There's also something to be said about music this corporeal, this somatic - I literally couldn't get my leg to stop its reactive momentum - that is also cognitively supportive. Eno's ambient releases are good for writing, but this is good for dancing as well as thinking. I mean it. Get work done.

Not quite my new favorite band, The Hives are still a group I'm happy to've learned about, if for nothing else than their spitting simplicity & their not-too-abrasive-but-still-effective-edge. W/ heavier drums than The Strokes, fewer rhythmic innovations than the Arctic Monkeys, & less melody than The Libertines, The Hives are both a part of this milieu but really something separate, primarily b/c they're more punk: 'Untutored Youth,' 'Outsmarted,' 'Mad Man.' 'Stuck in the ways of being an ass / & I got a lot of nerve that I'm ready to pass.' I wouldn't say they're as politically pertinent as the best of the punk scene, but they got something to say & I basically like how they get it across. 'I put up w/ being laughed at / 'Cause I put up w/ being me.'

'So you like that you're gonna love this.' 'Post-hardcore,' or in other words, the opposite of hardcore, Girls Against Boys aren't bad b/c they're overtly depressed but b/c they're shitty avant-garders, boasting dense lyrics that pose as spartan bits of esoteric wisdom: 'Some say shit just don't arrive / Some things just don't arrive'; 'I hope you don't have a good time'; 'That's new wet heart attack / That learned it all the way down.' Instrumentally, the band's got some oomph, especially on 'Let Me Come Back,' but the tracks don't vary enuf for me to bother. +, Scott McCloud wants desperately to be some Lou Reedian sage or Stipean poet, but he's far too mannered, too detached, & too uninteresting to effect a substantial or moving testament.

'Pounding the world / Like a bat-ter-ing ram.' These so-called 'metal gods' are ear-shat-ter-ing hams: they're not exactly actorly b/c their acting skills are awful, but they're performative & only this, i.e., you can detect nothing genuine in their bang-&-thud rhythms. They're never 'breaking the law' - their sonics are too formulaic - tho they go around pretending that they're rough & tough. 'So keep it up / Don't give in / Make a stand / We're gonna win.' That's honestly the only moment that's so bad it's almost good. I've always wanted to develop a taste for metal, especially 80s metal, one that is appreciative of camp & fantasy. I've yet to succeed, b/c besides a few moments of instrumental inventiveness & pop sensibilities, this is dreadful.

'The way is long, but you can make it easy on me.' Well, there's something here, something real, passional, & restorative, but it's also I've-heard-it-all-before-I-think-in-Walmart-music, & no surprises are ultimately proffered w/ these twelve tracks. 'Trade our places, take no chances / Bind me 'til my lips are silent.' Then again, synth-pop doesn't necessarily go for surprises, more like prolonged astonishment, the kind you get during a night out that has no single moment of revelation but a marathon of confidence & well-being. Personally, I'd rather have a bit of both, the long run as well as the short term, but CHVRCHES gives you religion & much less fun than you'd think. It's fun enuf tho, & proficiently produced, so I acquiesce . . . for now.

Parody is by definition a cynical art form, but it borders on nihilism when no accounting for such parodistic angles really exists. Exponents of 'chamber pop,' The Divine Comedy is at bottom just nineties baroque pop a la Scott Walker, The Associates, etc. Yet while Walker is our baroque genius, able to effect a classic sound made of dying aesthetics, The Divine Comedy has no interest in being taken seriously, happy to make fun of 'making fun of,' except on 'Songs of Love' & 'The Frog Princess,' closer to something that Stephin Merritt would compose, i.e., they're the best tracks here by far b/c they're soulfully eloquent. The rest is drab & insouciant, never in a durable Wildean mode. Irony is a necessary tool, but featureless parody dispirits.

There's subversive, there's immersive, & there's inventive: Entroducing..... is all three. The best trip-hop album out there, mainly b/c it's more hip-hop than it is trip-whatever, DJ Shadow's masterful debut simultaneously gives you an entrance & an exit point for the hip-hop universe. In other words, it is an elevated project that we're somehow still catching up w/, but it never asks too much of the listener - if you'd like, you could just turn this thing on & saunter thru its textures, excited now to check out what else the rappers & djs have to say. What I love most about it is that it's futurism & nostalgia at the same time: that's the gift of sampling, no? Here you are, blessed w/ this technology, but a dj's mind is historical, i.e., digging as dialectics, dig?

This Hampshire grad wears his Hampshirean hat too tight & conspicuously to be taken seriously, but the real problem is that there's so much hip-hop out there that's in this vein but way better: Kool Keith, Aesop Rock, Del the Funky Homosapien, to rattle off a few. I actually wish it was more smoked-out than it is, b/c this isn't druggy, it's languor, apathy, & intellectualism of a bogus & tedious kind. Kerouac & Cervantes creep in inanely, just showing off rather than reading deep: 'Dharma bums, rolling drum work better than GIs'; 'I'm as good as Don Quixote, smokin' peyote.' I thought 'Bladerunners' was the best track, but then realized that the Company Flow feature made it bang. Once Ladd came back in, I was asleep again, literally knocked out.

Oldfield's Tubular Bells is prog rock for those who've decided they needed more of the same over & over again, which is to say that Mike must've had dreams of being mindfulness guru Philip Glass but ended up w/ the same boring antics as EL&P, Yes, King Crimson, etc. What makes this record a particular nuisance is that you can detect so much of the British folk revival shit that plagued the late 60s & early 70s, except this time it's a futuristic nostalgia that renders it unlistenable. The songs don't change direction in a pleasant way - they just fiddle around, searching for something that isn't worth our hours to begin w/. Oldfield is truly a one-man band: he has one personality, if you can call it that; one story to tell, if you'd be so generous.