Reviews by verlainemorrison96

'The way you move, it's right in time / It's right in time w/ me'. To take this record into your heart, where it belongs, & resolve its genius, go ahead & return to PJ Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea & you'll get a sense of what Williams is up to. Lucinda & Harvey are our masters of airtight clarity as well as the tangibles of a floating ether: listening to either genius effects the sense that everything, I mean everything, can be known & cared for, that in the final analysis, we can never be too transcendent to be realistic. Of course, Lucinda is a southern realist while PJ's a Brit seer, & Williams has the advantage of a strong country tradition, but I think you catch my drift. I yield to both to feel that I'm not just of this world but in it.

'I'm a breakage inside.' Never panned, tho criticized for being too Bowie-influenced - e'en Bowie himself concedes that he 'used' Iggy as a means to his own creative ends - The Idiot's still fortified by the fact that there're 8/8 great tracks to choose from. You're proffered 'funtime' instead of 'fun house,' & Iggy is less explosive than he's wont to be on Stooges records or Lust for Life - it's indeed difficult the extract his characteristically physical style from these songs - but the strengths of the album are an undeniable feast. +, the 'China Girl' you get here is superior to the one on Let's Dance. It does start to sound like a Bowie record w/ vocals coming from elsewhere, alas, & the saxophonic parts on 'Tiny Girls' are feeble, but a debut to adore.

From The Notorious Byrd Brothers to Sweetheart of the Rodeo is a notable step but not unaccountable. The sixties counterculture was always more a matter of finding sustenance in a variety of traditions than it was merely a necessary break from boring conventions. In other words, if the blues can lay a foundation for psychedelia then why can't country. This is the best a Byrd can do, my favorite record of their catalogue, b/c it's the most fun & the most enigmatic. A large part of the fun is not knowing if irony has the last word: 'My buddies shun me, since I turned to Jesus / They say I'm missin' a whole world of fun / I live w/o them & walk in the light / I like the Christian life.' Whatchu think? More than anything tho, it sounds fin' great.

Let's see. In '77, the Ramones released their second studio album w/ Leave Home & the Sex Pistols debuted Never Mind the Bollocks, Bowie could do no wrong w/ 'Heroes' & Fleetwood Mac peaked w/ Rumours. A very good year in music, in other words. Rumour has it that Ash's first record refers to the year that Episode IV of the Star Wars trilogy came out, but it's Ash's fault if we're inclined to look back to the albums of that year & compare. It turns out 1977 doesn't compete w/ '77: these tracks are only catchy, which means they don't stay catchy for long, & there's no sound here that Oasis hadn't already developed/perfected on Definitely Maybe & Morning Glory. Unlike Oasis, who's catchy for days, Ash has 'bout a min of catchy half-life.

'Say something loving / I need a reminder, the feeling's escaped me'; 'Now you've set the scene / High on intimacy / Drawing me a bath.' Tho the xx's third release is not especially interesting or memorable, it's better than the debut b/c it's less sleepy, less dreamy, more embodied, more about bodies & love & the necessities of intimacy, no matter how potentially dangerous or violent. 'Every beat is a violent noise.' Romy & Oliver have some soul to express on this one - it at least feels as if it comes from something real - & I find my ears perking up to hear what's next. It's no soulful masterwork, & at less than forty mins, it yet drags & variegates little, but for what it is, I do not disapprove. 'I will be brave / I know you want me to.' Sure, why not?

'No money man could win my love / It's sweetness that I'm thinking of.' The detractors would say that this is dated even for '89, but Latifah's debut was dropped in '89 & Monie Love's first in '90, & this is at least on par w/ those classics. Good at both rapping & singing, she's more personality & ad-lib, forerunning both Lauryn & Elliott, than she's virtuosic or outta this world. I listen to this not for the lessons of it, tho they're there & you'd be remiss not to harken, but its winning & timeless flavors. This is no hip-hop record - it's an album w/ rapping on it. She had already been featured on Infected, the The's second, & 70s soul, particularly What's Going On, is clearly in her essence, i.e., she's too authentically all over the place to be a bounded gal.

This isn't as bad as I thought it could be, mainly b/c it's well produced & David Silveria (drums) has got authentic funk in his bones, but this's mostly capital K Korny: it doesn't even have the balls to be kampy. Failing to be a bastion of admirable or necessary sincerity, Korn suffers from the same thing that bankrupts Trent Reznor's creative production: it's not remotely an interesting statement lyrically. 'Life sometimes pisses me off / It's never a good trip to me / Every time I reach for love / It's taken away.' Duh & so fucking what. The Cube feature is especially korny, & Durst's moment in the sun is pathologically awful: 'You pumpkin pie, I'll jack off in your eye.' In short, it gets worse & worse, & no amount of raging funk can salvage it.

This is obviously THE Blondie record everyone knows, but that's for good reason. However we'll remember the band a hundred years from now will be based on our appreciation of this album as one of the classics of its era, a masterpiece not b/c the members were creative geniuses but b/c this is a perfect pop record. For some artists, their purposes converge on a single or two while for others, they span decades of creative output. Blondie is a group that made one essential album, which is not to say they have nothing else worth listening to, or that I love every song off Parallel Lines equally. It just means that when you get to the end of it, you'd be wont to say, 'that's as good as it gets.' And Debbie Harry's vocals possess underrated oomph.

'So, come all ye rolling minstrels / & together we will try / To rouse the spirit of the earth.' Everything about that is worth mockery of the folkiest kind, but I can't in good conscience hate Fairport Convention & yet dig Jefferson Airplane or Peter, Paul, & Mary, the American brands/bands of this kind of psychedelic moment. I mostly go for the American rather than the British in musical contexts, & the same remains in this case - I opt for Grace Slick & Mary Travers rather than Sandy Denny, & nostalgias for Hobbit lore don't appeal to me as much as Johnny Appleseed or Sleepy Hollow. But this does have its beautiful, if too Britannic, sequences, and it's far better than either The Incredible String Band or Pentangle. The long tracks drag as fuck tho.

Not only is this not prog, it's not bad - it's in fact very good. Closer in kind to authentic jazz rock, or jazz fusion, w/ a bit of free-jazz a la Archie Shepp, Soft Machine's Third does what it sets out to do, which is not to invent an entirely new language but to push rock music, especially the psychedelic brand, into a respectable & technically proficient underground. Admittedly, it does lose its jazz origins on 'Moon In June,' but I'd take that track over a slog off any record by Yes, King Crimson, ELP. On most days, I'd even take it over a less inspired number by Cream. The only failings of the record, as I listen to it, are the organs and flutes, those tedious and soft instruments I cannot help but associate w/ the worst of Brit idiocy: Jethro Tull, Uriah H.

The fact that Djam Leelii (Maal + Seck) is one of the most blissed-out but earth-bounded albums I've heard didn't make it easy to go into this record w/o being somewhat disappointed. Even if Lam Toro isn't a failure, which it isn't, the one w/ Seck is a masterpiece, so the standards are simply higher. But even w/o the (unfair) comparison in mind, Lam Toro is not only bent on something that is more pop than authentic - it seems to be reaching for a sound that ought to be, for this artist at least, second nature. To go pop & to be real are not mutually exclusive: our best pop artists prove that it's so, over & over. Yet, the chill vibes these songs produce are exactly that & not much more. Still, 'Gidelam' is a substantial one, & it all mostly hits for bits.

Tho many of these tracks are classics that simply pervaded the airwaves of the 2010s, they're not in my psyche like the ones off Twisted Fantasy. I had never heard Yeezus all the way thru, not b/c I found the ostentatiousness of the project off-putting, but b/c the record that preceded it had the zeitgeist pinned down and Kanye's messianic sense of self was either endearing or a not-too fleshed-out barrier to aesthetic pleasure. There's a lot of aesthetic merit that Yeezus carries, principally at the sonic level, but I cannot deal w/ Ye's self-conviction that he's offering more food for thought than he is, i.e., a lot of this is just vacuous: 'Eatin' Asian pussy / All I need was sweet and sour sauce.' An album like this needs its irony; sincere, it fails to say much.

There is no hip-hop record, or album of any genre, this angry & this funky, not even Straight Outta Compton. While Dre's funk is sleek & tranquil, the Bomb Squad is as dirty as George Clinton & Isaac Hayes, & just as pull-no-punches as Bad Brains, which is exactly what the doctor ordered for Cube on his debut. 'It ain't wise to chastise and preach / Just open the eyes of each'; 'It's the American way / 'Cause I'm the G-A-N-G-S-T-A.' Ice Cube has one of the most recognizable voices in hip-hop history: like his mentor Chuck D, O'shea's vocals are clarity clarified. But what maters most here are the lyrics, and the fact that he's always assuming a persona that is no exaggeration but simply his country. I don't want to hear about the sexism.

Unlike Rocket from the Crypt (John Reis aka Speedo), Drive Like Jehu isn't junk punk but punk punk: the real deal, the bang-it-out-&-slam-it-out-in-order-to-feel-it-out-hardcore-variety. At the same time, they're properly post-hardcore & proto-emo: these tracks are long, they often slow down & meditate, & the lyrics aren't sanguine packages of wisdom. 'You weren't & it isn't & nobody's listening / & nobody gives a fuck what you do w/ your life'; 'This is my cause & my excuse / I'll take the loss but I'll get what I got due.' In reality, Yank Crime doesn't feel like '94. In Utero came out in '93, Ready to Die & Illmatic were the records of the year, & I just can't imagine a record this inventively abrasive would've sold. It didn't sell. Yet, a slapper.

A candidate for greatest record in rock history, Electric Ladyland is the only album, perhaps the only artistic statement, you need to convince yourself that the sixties really were that monumental an explosion in the history of ideas, & not just musical ones. We all have our favorites, albums that not only mean a lot to us but are works of genius when you really get down to it, but then there are figures that were so clearly on a different wavelength that it's difficult to put them in the same breath. Jimi, like Miles, like Louis, like Ella, like Ray, like Robert Johnson, is a conceptual & material breaker & shaker of form. & this record, probably his best, is one of the all-time rock, soul, funk, jazz, country, psychedelic, & - yep - pop albums. A true banger.

It's not noodling, it's foolish & humorless, but what do you expect from the group that could almost be a great indie band but decided to go all out on camp and the polished technicalities of eighties metal, i.e., generic pop-rock from the nineties. I don't know if it's run its course or if it ever really had one, but I do know that it's not only not for me but it oughtn't be for any of us who appreciate a changing/daring art form. Iron Maiden's notion of the sublime is to front their songs w/ thirty secs of soft & introspective licks, & then to return to their redundancies. It's almost inexplicable that people still dig this shit - it's not hard & heavy, it's neat & refined, soulless & witless, something I'd never return to even for the joke of it. A baffling eyesore.

Science-fictional rave, a dance-punk revival, & at times aggressive metal, at least vocally and guitar-wise ('Atlantis To Interzone'), Myths Of The Near Future (Ballard) is, in the end, a proper pop record, nothing more and not much less. Very well produced, full of literary references, & easy to take down, it's yet not a memorable or meaningful thing, neither musically nor conceptually. What they're getting at, no one knows and no one cares; the Pynchon/Burroughs/Ballard footnotes are annoying. 'Night touched my hands / W/ the turning, golden skans'; 'Galloping, galloping beams faster'; 'All ships of sense on hyper ocean / All kinds of chaos still in motion.' It's a watered-down, unnecessary recall of Joy Division, w/o any of the dignity.

The punks love 'em b/c they play fast, sloppy, & rudimentary, metalheads love em' b/c, well, they look the part and their songs are good for the fine art of headbanging, but the truth is they're neither punk nor metal just as they're not the back-to-brass-tacks-rock-n-roll that Lemmy says they are. They are a hard rock band, i.e., think Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, Van Halen, or AC/DC. I can't stand most hard rock, but Motörhead is an honest exception b/c they're hard but too carefree to be that other quality that often drags these talented acts into dreadful self-seriousness: heavy. Even AC/DC is too self-important. +, as far as live rock albums go, tho this is not quite at the level of Live/Dead or At Fillmore East, it's damned good.

This is virtuosic. So extensive yet so slight, so insincere/cynical yet for real and begotten from hearts that feel, 69 Love Songs is unlike anything before or since. I mean, Stephin Merritt is sorta an American Morrissey, but not all literary depressives are made the same, and The Magnetic Fields frontman has his own reasons for being an unbelieving and ornery curmudgeon. +, it isn't like there's no joy here - there's plenty and it's infectious. It's no easy task to pick out a favorite line, but here's one: 'We don't have to be stars exploding in the night, or electric eels under the covers / We don't have to be anything quite so unreal, let's just be lovers.' And if you think it's simply too long, you could just listen to one disc at a time. It really isn't that hard.

'If I had a voice, I would sing'; 'I put my soul in what I do'; 'I'm very good w/ plants / When my friends are away / They let me keep the soil moist.' This is a unique record. Every ounce of me is telling me that it ain't all that, not b/c it's a guilty pleasure but rather b/c I think I'll grow tired of it and that I'll never be attached to it. But lyrically, Karin is artsy but not fartsy, and what is more important, they make music that's deep for a bit and fun for a bit longer. It's an extraordinary fusion of Björk's oddnesses and the sincere feel-goodness of the Pet Shop Boys (Very), w/ some of the more mercurial aspects of Eno. It's a strange thing, but not too strange, and it's majoring as much as it's minoring. I don't know how often I'll come back. It yet hits.