Reviews by verlainemorrison96

Somehow an event in rock music, pop music, and of course country music w/o being either country rock or pop country, Honky Tonk Masquerade is a beautiful, inevitable, and rockin' record. The upbeat tracks are authentic party tunes and rock 'n' roll classics, especially 'Boxcars' and 'Fingernails,' while the more morose and pining numbers warmly recall Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. Cited as the best of seventies country albums as well as a foreshadowing of what was to come w/ country mainstays like Yoakam and George Strait, it's that but also to be judged on its own terms. At times, it's as colorful and rockin' as anything off Exile on Main St., at others it's plain & simple country roots. However you'd like to take it in, take it in and flow.

This is junk punk, especially on the more dumb and aggressively unmusical tracks like 'On a Rope' or 'Suit City,' but it does come into a kind of its own on songs like 'Young Livers' or 'Drop Out,' featuring endearing horns and a lead vocal performance from Speedo that effectively marries Strummer w/ Westerberg. 'Ah, something's wrong with Gertrude / Ah, she don't like the attitude.' Like all proper punks, RFTC tell stories about neighborhood gals and pals, as the Ramones did about Sheena, the Clash about Rudie, & The Replacements about Tommy and his tonsillectomy. But all in all, this is only an average punk record, not a very nineties affair - uniformed by grunge or even The Offspring - and just not nearly as good as what we had gotten 'fore in the late seventies and eighties.

I guess the seventies really were at wit's end w/ the hippies, b/c there is no reason why this record should've been as panned as it was upon release. I don't think it's a matter of Crosby being too forward-thinking for the critics to catch up w/ - this isn't On the Corner or Exile on Main St. I think it's b/c, at certain point, it was embarrassing to embrace a singer who belted, w/ an angel's soul, lyrics such as 'I was mistaken, only a child laughing in the sun / Ahhhhhhhhhhhh in the sun' or 'Peace is not an awful lot to ask.' For this sideways hippie, however, I'd like to keep that spirit alive. +, Crosby is, w/o question, the most impressively soulful vocalist of sixties psychedelia this side of Joe Cocker and John Fogerty. It's good music; 'tisn't too blessed.

Brett Anderson, putting the pieces together of Poly Styrene & Morrissey, & backed by instrumentals that are at once distorted & clear, upbeat & minor, proves that the best pop music doesn't 'go pop' - it simply falls into place and hits the right chords. Suede's debut is undoubtedly in the pantheon of great punk records & the most slamming pop albums, w/ a bit of poetry/art in the mix (this is where the Smiths comparisons occur): 'I was born as a pantomime horse / Ugly as the sun when he falls to the floor'; 'Where the canine in the a-line stole your time / You can only go so far for womankind.' In short, Suede is unexpectedly beautiful, perhaps in the vanguard of the Britpop crusade, but really a sui generis event, a tulip in scuffed-up locales.

Authentic 'background' music, LTJ's original '96 compilation, available on YouTube rather than Spotify or Apple Music, is a classic of the British jungle sound, which means that what you get is something that is awakening & lucid, graceful & human. Those are admittedly superlatives, and I am not one to overrate the drum-and-bass genre, but if you commit to taking it in from the 'background' - that is, if you don't assume 'club banger' but 'out-for-a-stroll' - these tracks will creep to the foreground w/ unexpected taste & soulfulness. The record can't be perfect: it is simply too repetitive and unmotivated. Still, b/c it's halcyon rather than placid - invigorating instead of merely stimulating - it's got a special quality. I would not work out to it.

'I saw a vampire / I saw a ghost / Everybody scared me / But you scared me the most.' Newman writes baroque & ironic pop standards, vocally as far from Scott Walker or Tom Waits as you can be but likewise addicted to the potential of show tunes in blues-soaked America. Lyrically, treasures really do abound, cleverly, socially, & politically: 'Oh, who would think a boy and bear / Could be well accepted everywhere'; 'They don't respect us, so let's surprise them / We'll drop the big one and pulverize them.' But none of this would remotely work if the man didn't have soul. Yet, he does have soul, & not only a respectful reserve but a bluesy, all-too-human supply ('Old Man,' 'You Can Leave Your Hat On,' 'God's Song'). This is salubrious; it's honest.

Tho it's a cliché to say that nothing quite sounds like it - of course the best music out there is special and unto itself - there's simply no record like this debut, an album that oddly means a lot to me even if I don't regularly quote Stipe's obscure, playful lyrics or hum these prolific choruses. I guess what is most remarkable about Murmur is that I'm not sure how they pulled it off - the 'first indie rock album' could've easily been just another indie blunder, but it not only stands up, it has yet to be imitated. Like, if I were to say that no band sounds like the Cocteau Twins, that's true but obvious. But I don't know how it can be that Murmur is such a unique body of tracks: so curt & so delicate. 'Your hate, clipped and distant / Your luck, a two-headed cow.'

Tho I'm still fuzzy on the origins of this record and the untimely death of its creator, I know that what I'm hearing - a technologized bossa nova - is not something I was expecting to dig as much as I do. What makes it work - in fact, what's entirely obvious about the project, almost to a fault - is that, as substantial and meaningful as the genre is, bossa nova is also atmospheric music: the vibes are the colorful engenderers of reality, of essences & raw materials. The same is true of the best electronic music, be it Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Bros, or Brian Eno (a hero of Suba's). When I put this record on, tho I don't know what it feels like to be in São Paulo, having never been there, I feel like I'm 'somewhere,' which means the vibes are working. Sim?

Some post-punk (Pere Ubu) is unabashedly art-rock, primarily taking their leads from Television, while new-wave outfits like Blondie embrace a more pop-oriented sound. The Fall falls somewhere between art and pop, not an avant-garde explosion - instrumentally they're too friendly, too in-a-groove and corporeally sensible - yet too obscure lyrically to be considered a pop band thru and thru: 'Musical chairs rouge cheeks he remembers / Thru' the aqueducts of five years'; 'On an Asiatic plane / W/ wings not of grain.' That balance ought to be something we celebrate, and this record has moments worthy of praise, but listening to this often felt like I was being washed over by an unplanned indecisiveness: an absence of meaning, purposeful spirit.

From the jump, I couldn't tell if Hawley crooned pastiche, authenticity, or a bit of both, but soon realized it didn't really matter. These songs are self-justifiers, every note being the right one, the vibrant one, the dark one, the lonely one. Like Roy Orbison, Hawley's central topic is loneliness, and I find it very cool that we get to have an Orbison of the 21st century, tho there's also some Johnny Cash and Petula Clark in the mix as well. Lyrically, he's where he needs to be, not masterful like Costello or Smokey but good enuf and at times memorable: 'So think of me, when you feel that moon / Oh it calls to me, as it calls to you.' Still, opting for retro has its costs, even if the music is damned good: it's a mood piece, a moody piece, and can be drab.

While you'd be compelled to call Head Hunters a fusional affair, it's got too little experimental attitude for that appellation, and I mean that as a good thing. It's really a very straight-up effort, so sturdy and controlled that you would think Herbie had been a funkster all along. From a technical point of view, it's got waves of inventions but few left-turns: it's music, black music, one way or another, which is how I think Hancock and the crew engineered it. At a moment in the seventies when the black arts had established a true sense of thickness and the possibilities of profundity, a record such as this probably made a whole lot of sense, i.e., it was an inevitable statement. So when you put it on today, it's not old news, it's just news, as it always was.

You don't have to listen that closely to detect the melodies thru the noise, nor does it take much to locate the noise in the sweetness of the melodies, which spells out mastery to me. Like The VU, Pavement commands what can only be called sincere irony, that is, they're ironic about their insincerity - they actually care, they're only slackers in image. Stephen Malkmus is a bad singer in the same way that Lou Reed can't hold a note: it's a genuine ineptitude. And yet, he tries his ass off to carry a tune, thereby creating a climate of unwonted effort/labor. And when they're obscure, they're also funny: 'And I wouldn't want to shake their hands / 'Cause they're in such a high-protein land.' So what do you get? - light, heavy, funny, serious, jazz.

The issue with fusion/hybrid music, which Ozomatli epitomizes, is that it so rarely digs deep into the genres it claims to explore: the Latin accents do not have much going for them, the rapping is corny and weak, the lyrics are platitudinal, dully uplifting, and superficially political, the production is one-note and one-dimensional. This is like the music you'd hear at a party at the playa that no amount of alcohol will have you feeling - the next drink may in fact make things worse. The best track is 'Who's To Blame,' which features an impressive but unmemorable verse from Chali 2na. Look, if you want pop-rap-rock from LA, Black Eyed Peas are your flawed go-to. This is about as offensively bland as you can get, the pacification of genres I love.

'Just waitin' for the sun to carry me in'; 'But I like the sun when / Fallin' thru another plain'; 'The weather for me / Are the birds flyin' home.' 'Sun talk' like this - and general allusions to cheery and careless weather - achieves a sunny, buzzing atmosphere that evokes sixties pop-rock via a return to the unironic optimisms of Oasis. Labeled as garage rock, and therefore a sort of contemporary of The Strokes or Arctic Monkeys, they have some of that on tracks like 'Highly Evolved' and 'Get Free,' but for the most part, this is nineties-alt in 2002, hence the faulty comparisons to Nirvana. It's yet too whimsical for that likening: Kurt sings w/ a heart on his sleeves and brows; Nicholls w/ a happiness he doesn't always know what to do w/. Strange 1.

I'll grant Iron Maiden this: at the very least, their debut is more 'rock' than 'metal' - if you peer closely, you may even be able to locate some traces of the burgeoning indie scene (real closely). The issue is I don't like 'rock.' I don't care to be the guy who distinguishes 'rock 'n' roll' from 'rock,' or 'hip hop' from 'rap,' but there's a truth to the pedantic differences. It's as if the genre that Zeppelin invented and Sabbath dissected would struggle to go pop and to go avant-garde almost immediately. Besides a few exceptions, my taste for this music stops with those two. 'I'm running free, yeah / I'm running free.' It tries desperately to be pump-up music that's technical & operatic, but it's just uneventfully dumb and only powerlessly impressive.

This record will have you believe that Bad Brains is way more thrash than hardcore, but H.R. is still a vocalist/lyricist from that tradition, & Hudson's drumming style cultivates a speed that's punk-not-metal. B/c it vaunts a collection of tracks rather than a set of rawly exploding ideas that make up their debut, I Against I is a smoothed-over enterprise, which is not perforce a bad thing, but I do prefer their self-titled, one of the great albums of the 80s. 'I came down to make you overstand / That this gross sphere is not Jah land.' Spiritually, the Rastafarian tones are embedded not accented - indeed, here their statement is inherent whereas on the first it’s punctuated. I miss that initial energy, and honestly I'm 'let down,' but I can still 'get down.'

'Your wish is not granted unless it's a fish'; 'He can't dream well b/c of his horns.' The only reason this is more palatable than Pentangle is b/c they're Scottish rather than English and that somehow, tho it's a cluttered mess of Brit-Isle-foppery, moments of genuine mysticism do shine thru. Not nearly enuf tho, and the quirkiness of these tracks deprive the record of what you could call spiritual/mythical experiences. Thing is, I'm not saying there's no folkloric tradition to celebrate from this part of the world. I just go to Astral Weeks for a dosage of that magic, not an album that tries too desperately to be an ancient landmark. I went to a summer camp called Shire Village, of all names, so I can relate to this album art. But I'm not a fucking wizard.

'Dance music,' which Basement Jaxx makes, has always been oxymoronic for me, not b/c dance + music don't go together - they clearly do - but b/c there's a way in which this is too on the nose: hearing these beats, all I'd like to do is dance and therefore all I can imagine doing is not dancing. I'm not sure what it is, but as soon as I figure I'll lean into their house magic, I retreat from the seduction. Perhaps that says something about me rather than the music, but I can't pretend to love this thing even if I kinda like it. It's as if you shouldn't have to claim a record as 'dance music': it either is or it's not, or maybe it depends on context. This genre is the context itself, so I'm left asking, dance music? How does that work? Influential Brits, tho.

Post Orgasmic Chill is one of those albums that exceeds my expectations yet lets me down: way more soulful, funky, rockin' than I had any reason to believe, it's still not something I'd necessarily return to, lacking a song or three I'd call eternal. Lyrically, the group is like Rage Against The Machine + Pixies + Alice in Chains, that is, political, weird as hell, and in the shit: 'A lone brother, a lone sister / a home cover, alone'; 'Black, black, black, black, black, black / White, white, white, white, white, white'; 'God licks your face, just like your dog.' But what they have, lamentably, is that 'radio' sound, so that when they go pop, as they occasionally do ('Secretly'), it feels like they are selling out, even if they're remaining true. It's a production thing, right?

It’s long, too long, and ‘something’ tells me it’s not as prolific as Beatles Harrison, but it’s still good, and can even be very good, w/o squinting that much to find the pleasure. I appreciate the near-nineties affect of the record, at times approaching a shoegazing fecundity, an acoustic grunginess, an optimism only that decade knew, tho it of course draws from the blues- and folk-rock of the sixties. I had to get used to its laidback quality, which nearly and sometimes did take away the oomph of the thing, but it's so much better than Clapton’s casual solo flows, and thus has my ear. Besides, we all do root for George, don’t we?