Reviews by verlainemorrison96

The Coral are essentially a sixties outfit, not only b/c James Skelly's vocals are reminiscent of Eric Burdon & Mark Lindsay, the organ has you jamming like The Doors, & the compositions are playfully soulful like The Kinks, The Stones, & The Mamas & the Papas, but b/c an act of discovery in the realm of rock 'n' roll underlies the entire project. In other words, refreshingly, The Coral has you feeling that this is music that's only been around for three or four years, & they just can't wait to share what they've heard. 'It feels like I'm fixin' to die / She took my soul and she blew my mind.' Not much here is that deep, at least from a conceptual point of view, but who needs that when you've got soul? So yea, better than expected & better than mucho.

I usually rate electronic music on a scale of how bad it is for you, not that any of it is really good for you, tho the best of it should have at least some restorative effects, e.g., Massive Attack, Chemical Bros. Like, it should be more than background music - you know, it should get INSIDE your body - but I don't want it to be so immersive that there's no critical distance - it's still a mediated product. At this level, Our Aim Is To Satisfy succeeds. The drums are heavy, the grooves are suggestive, the cerebellum is relaxed but tuned-in. At another level, however, this is not a success, which has simply to do w/ the fact that the music isn't very good. Not bad - just that quality that's impossible to write about, i.e., unmemorable. Featureless I think 'tis.

Equipped w/ 'bebop moons,' 'alligator rain,' 'powder-keg legs,' Marc Bolan is a donnish pioneer of glam, mindful of language & its weirdness. But he's no proggish, I mean priggish, star: he's got too much rock 'n' roll for that, i.e., check out 'Jeepster.' Harkening back to groups like The Platters & The Flamingos on 'Monolith,' T. Rex are truer to their American roots than even Led Zeppelin b/c they're more full-spectrum. That don't mean they make better music, only that Electric Warrior is very good & Bolan is unique amongst the Brits-doing-USA-schtick. Essentially boogie rock, Rex is almost the British ZZ Top, w/ more jazz, strings, & balladeering. None of it is ornamental tho, & even if it begins to lose its edge towards the final few tracks, EW is a keeper.

'Ain't it a shame that you can't say "fuck" (fuck) / Fuck's just a word & it's all fucked up.' Compare that to Eminem's crusade against censorship, & you'll see who has the cultural & cerebral edge: 'Will Smith don't gotta cus in his raps to sell records / Well I do, so fuck him, & fuck you too.' I don't give a fuck if you don't give a fuck, unless you don't give a fuck freshly & revolutionarily. 'Burn this motherfucker down.' Nothing 'bout Durst & co. is impressively countercultural or subversive. The problem is they also sound bad, i.e., their songs aren't helpful or creative examples of pop metal, rap-metal, or rage styles. I love the word 'fuck' - I think it's English's best & by far most versatile word - but after this record, even I need a break. F this!

Of all things I could've expected from this record, a throwback wasn't one of 'em. But Chris's cadences are Michael Jackson's, his image is Prince's, & the production he sports is like DeBarge + Alphaville. He does posses a contemporary comp, which would be Dev Hynes, but 2018 is not the year I'd associate w/ an album like this one. It's not that he's willfully nostalgic; he just honestly boasts an aesthetic that's not of the now. The music itself is a fluent brand of pop music, sexy but not sexualized, fantasy-bound tho tethered to simpler realities, w/ some poetic moments as well: 'I chose to talk w/ violent hits, blossoms again'; 'Run if you stole a shard of sunlight.' I can't say I'm in love w/ the second half, but overall, the eighties are back!

Like The Rascals, The Animals, the early Kinks, & Them (V. Morrison), Paul Revere & The Raiders straddle two musical worlds of the sixties, one that's simply pop music, the other that's pop qua soulful rock 'n' roll. Bands such as these tend to be forgotten b/c they didn't go as 'far' as The Beatles, The Stones, The Beach Boys, or The Kinks, & they don't have a classic album to their name. Mostly, they're remembered for one number & only one, in this case the classic 'Kicks.' But having listened to Midnight Ride thru, reveling in Mark Lindsay's voice, which sits somewhere between Burdon & Jagger, I'm convinced that this is one of the more underrated releases of the sixties based on the fact that it never misses. Let's celebrate that consistency.

You know what this sounds like? The British Steely Dan, w/ a bit of Stevie Wonder in there for good measure. You know who they foreshadow? Well, this is cheating now, but J Dilla brilliantly samples "The Worst Band In The World" on his classic 2006 Donuts. That's actually not a bad place to go w/ this review. Sheet Music is an album full of inventive things, almost a treasure trove of sounds that a hip-hop producer would have a field day w/, but it's not a record to fall in love w/ on its own terms. 10cc is not as zany as Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, or Paul McCartney, not nearly as tight as Steely Dan, & simply too proggy to be enjoyable. I'm surprised that I dig it as much as I do, & for my money, they do it better than Queen ever could.

Yes, this is Beefheart's masterpiece, it's one of the greatest experimental expressions of the sixties, & a touchstone for any & all of us who opt for a history of blues music vis-a-vis a turning-inside-out of that genre. I love Led Zeppelin, I really do, but this puts to shame the notion that they were 'blues historians,' that they took the blues & put their own spin on it. THIS is the blues so finely tuned that it's got no choice but to be different, to be a big slice of strangeness, to be 'avant-garde.' It's also a free jazz record, w/ all the energy, electricity & humor of Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, or Joe Harriott. 'A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast & bulbous. Got me?' You goddamn right I listen to this unironically. It's fucking great.

'The weather's fine / & I feel so so-so, so.' One of the great debuts, b/c it tells you where it's coming from w/o telling you a damn thing about where it's going, Here Come The Warm Jets is gorgeous, obnoxious, artsy, & for the common folk. Like The VU, Eno is experimental but leaves more than enuf ground for ordinary realisms: '& they're saving their labor for insane reading / Some of them lose, and some of them lose.' Best of all, these ten tracks are ones I want to listen to (again), & at only ten, the record goes by fast & happy. He's really letting you know that the warm jets are coming, that things are on their way to better planes & warmer heights. It's faraway & immediate, it's musing pop & gritty rock-n-roll, & it's produced to an E.

Ghanian-Scottish dub reggae & blues, Finley Quaye is a better find than he is a listen, if that makes sense. That's not to say that Maverick A Strike is not a worthwhile listen, that it has no soul, or that it boasts no talents of a gifted singer/musician. It's to concede that it's a period piece, giving you a sense of what could sell during the nineties. This hit #3 in the UK, which means it was pretty fucking popular. & it's not bad. But it's also not good, & approaches thoroughly incoherent: 'Even after all the murdering that go on / Even after all, oh no, your suffering, so / You know I love you so'; 'This is the future, hey / I ain't gonna shoot you, hey.' These aren't pop songs - they're songs for pop airplay. That has its place, tho probs only for a week.

'Well, it isn't so great / Since you learned karate / Chop-chop-chop-chop-chop.' Why I'd be surprised that Black Francis/Frank Black could pull it off as a solo act doesn't quite figure since the Pixies are a generationally great band, but boy does he make it happen on his second solo release. Kookier & yet more sensible than anything he did w/ the Pixies, he at times sounds like C. Beefheart meets Lou Reed meets America, at others like a far more impressive Knopfler, especially on 'Calistan.' But mostly this is just a really fucking good collection of pop-rock songs: whacky b/c that's what it can mean to be happy, to be upbeat, to be optimistic, to be in a good-for-you mood. 'I'm Sir Rockaby / And rockin' I am.' Rockin' he is, & rockin' is right.

Still punk, b/c it's anthemic & it says what it means, even if it's symbolically engaged, Killing Joke is unquestioningly ahead of its time. The industrial strokes & obscurer lyrical moments presage a new confessional energy in music: 'Horror, don't let me go on / Mommy, they'll take his pain away.' W/ this said, it has groovy intentions, & seems to be drawing from the store of 'robot pop' that Kraftwerk initiated, e.g., check out 'Bloodsport.' Like The Clash before 'em, pop matters, & I say thank god to that: you only note the burgeoning mess of industrial self-pity that Reznor & co. venerate so uglily: 'After wakening, silence grows / The screams subside, distortion shows.' It isn't all that original tho. Unknown Pleasures dropped in '79. & it did more.

'So always make me wonder / Always make me guess / & even if I ask you / Oh darling, don't confess.' That's a tortured soul for ya, the kind that this genre, like the blues, so effortlessly, joyfully manifests. These songs are so much darker than you could really imagine, but Loretta's voice, like Dolly's, like Patsy's, & yes, like Tammy's, has got so much energy - so much devoted body & soul - that you'd be wont to have a good time listening to these 12 classic tracks, even the most morose of 'em: '& the love that kept this old heart beating / Has been shattered by the closing of a door.' For lovers of contradictions - dialectical interplay & things that don't quite make sense - this is a feast. Yeah, she should leave him. That's the point now, isn't it?

Count me as shocked that the Foo Fighters were Dave Grohl & only Grohl on the first record. Grohl essentially picks up where Nirvana left off, but it's really more than that. Cobain's suicide is clearly the thematic underlay of the project, & the album is as much a working thru as it as a talking about, i.e., grungy cathartics take on a more specific meaning here: 'I've taken all & I've endured / One day it all will fade, I'm sure'; 'Beg me to talk about it / I could stand to prove'; 'Hate it, hate it / Hate it, hate it / Hate it, hate it.' I do appreciate the tragic backdrop to which this album is an answer, & some of tunes have memorable bite & punch, but as far as the music goes overall, it's legitimately emotional but not all that interesting. 'Raw' won't suffice.

W/ Astral Weeks, Hejira is the record that's most meaningful to me, at once the music that brought me back to myself & exploded any & all senses of what it means to be a self-encoded man (shrooms will do that to ya). The song that's got the most revelatory energy is 'Amelia,' a lullaby searching inevitably, realistically. Quiet, confident, & self-willed inquiry really frames the entire record, & road trip as theme, point of departure & point of arrival, matters greatly: 'I was driving across the burning desert / When I spotted six jet planes / Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain.' Jaco is the other genius, of course, & his lines were once what I felt to be literally living within, but Joni is an almost frighteningly gifted artist. No comp, no.

'And the more he talked to me, you know / The more he reached me.' Joni is reachin' here, that is, she's happenin', she's loosenin', & she's gettin' it goin': no graspin' at straws here, just reachin' like Digable Planets reach, like the best psychedelics reach, just like the best jazz and funkadelia reach & go on reachin'. You can almost hear the origins of dream pop, so elastic is her voice, ironic b/c she's a lyricist who wants to be heard while Liz Fraser has no such desire. I guess that's b/c 'Saying, laughing, and crying, / You know it's the same release.' It's pretty rare to have a 'folk' singer who's as good a songwriter as she is a vocalist, but that's what Joni offers, the goat in many ways. I may enjoy Hejira a bit more, but that's honest preference.

'Leapfrog the dog / And brush me daddy-o'; 'It's so sad when you're young / To be told you're having fun.' Adam & The Ants 'try another flavor' in that they ape indigenous imagery, not a surprise given their association w/ that poacher Malcolm McLaren. I gotta say Brits habited in tribal apparel don't exactly speak to moi. I don't want to moralize, but w/o a political correct angle, criticism of the record still has to begin w/ its visual symbolism: why the war paint? why the colorful eagle feathers? why the warrior postures? At the (merely) sonic level, the band is 1/3 Clash, 1/3 Talking Heads, & 1/3 Joy Division. They yet have a certain air of self-import that I can't get past, so an album (the original 12 tracks) w/ every other song a bop ain't so hot.

Make no mistake, this is a New York City album: the attitude, atmosphere, and accent is undoubtedly of Spanish Harlem/Washington Heights origin. I say this knowing that Puente reached into the bag of Cuban music & was essentially an importer of Latin jazz, but as a native of NYC, I can't listen to this w/o seeing the streets of upper Manhattan, hearing the buzz of a block party, & smelling the fatty glories of mofongo & chicharrónes. I cannot say the same about Bueno Vista Social Club, for instance - that's Cuban thru & thru. As for the music, I'm not sure if Tito is breaking any major rules, & b/c its style is second nature to me, it isn't easy to be completely in awe of his genius. Still, it's far more than competent, & the rhythms achieve e'ry time.

'14th of February 1899 / The British ship Veronica was lost w/o a sign.' A concept album in the vein of Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, a dreadful record, & The Kink's Arthur, a wonderful record, The Bee Gees's Odessa is annoying but isn't all bad. 'It makes me laugh / You got no friends / It took a thousand years to find out why / You'll never see my face again.' That's not quite Dylan on 'Positively 4th Street' or 'Idiot Wind,' but it's got some real-deal avenging power. 'Marley Purt Drive' is a genuinely soulful number that reproduces the magic The Band at its best nearly has a monopoly on. Odessa is what you call an effective, sometimes gorgeous, often saccharine, silly, eternally boring mixed bag. 'Give Your Best,' nice 1.

Released in 1970, Close to You is about as close as you'll get to a genuine retrospective of the sixties, I mean one that acknowledges that for every Hendrix, Joplin, & Grace Slick there was a Lulu, a Sonny & Cher, & a Petula Clark. I love the latter 3, if not as much as the former 3 visionaries, then w/ no amount of white guilt whatsoever. B/c the Carpenters are white, really, really fucking white, but not distractingly, vulgarly white like Lawrence Welk but charmingly, authentically white like Randy Newman or The Walker Bros. No, Karen Carpenter is neither Bobby Hatfield nor Dusty Springfield - she simply isn't as memorable or as dynamic a vocalist - but she can no doubt sing, & sings w/ soul. I think she's especially masterful on 'Crescent Moon.'