Reviews by verlainemorrison96

'Bittersweet, strawberry, marshmallow, butterscotch / Polar bear, cashew, dixieland, phosphate, chocolate.' Grant's voice is too flat and unenthused to be transcendent, tho the music clearly aims for that thing that's larger than life, that will catapult the drudger into a brighter world. At his best, he boasts a gift for theatrical melodies, not nearly on the level of a heroic kind of melody-maker like Stevie Wonder, but w/ a similar penchant for complex configurations. His glib lyricism can be tasteful, especially on tracks like 'Chicken Bones' or 'Silver Platter Club,' but it doesn't approach the quality of Stephin Merritt's casual angst. In other words, it's got that I-care-so-much-I-can't-keep-caring-so-much-affect, and he only seldom pulls it off.

50 is not a great lyricist, he's not a very imaginative songwriter, and he isn't one of those rappers like Juvenile whose flow is such a melodic thing that you're not always sure if you're listening to hip-hop or a hybrid form. What he's got tho is one of the great voices in rap history, a direct inheritor of the nonchalant yet troubled aspects of a Biggie or a Scarface. He can also be scary as a motherfucker, i.e., when he spits a line like this, don't tell me you aren't warier: 'And if you got a glass jaw, you should watch your mouth / 'Cause I'll break your face / Have your ass runnin,' mumblin' to the jake.' A limited artist by definition, he never made a record nearly as memorable as this one. But man did things assemble in the right way on his '03 classic.

If you don't like this b/c you can't understand the lyrics, that's silly. At this point, the Cocteau Twins were clearly making instrumental music, and Liz Fraser was the lead instrumentalist. If you don't like it b/c it's too ethereal, I'm more on your side, but I'd also ask you to take it in w/ an ear for music that's coming from a place few others would dare go, for the shame of it, the romance of it, the sentimentality of it. As the record builds, the more it works its magic on me, the more I'm convinced by its sheer gorgeousness. W/ a complete, almost cloistered belief in themselves, the Twins make art that's remarkably unironic. I couldn't, as some I know, exclusively listen to their paradisal craft. But w/ underrated variety, they're a stirring one-off.

'Snot running down his nose / Greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes.' It isn't the flute, no, it isn't the flute that makes this record a shitty exposition of all that would be wrong w/ rock music until punk revived a sense of the real and the basic. Well, it's not only the flute, which is just a symptom of a genre and an approach that emphasizes ornamentation rather than details. These songs never get going b/c they're conceptual monsters, stuck in the throat of a bloke w/ no regard for the pleasures of music, everything a very plodding adventure into a British realm I have all the reason in the world to eschew. 'My God,' is Ian Anderson ever a self-serious windbag, opting for the flute b/c of the hot air he's full of. Problem: he has an inexhaustible store.

'Back to silence back to minus / W/ the purple sky behind us.' Like Another Green World, Before and After Science contains songs, real, fun, bright, & light songs, w/ meaning and heartbeat in 'em. The master of ambience has his final foray into the music that must've made him, that must've been the answer to all his boyish questions & fears: forward-thinking pop music, the kind that sweeps you off your feet and holds you closest. B/c there is a sense of farewell on this record, especially the core of 'King's Lead Hat' & 'Here He Comes,' a sense that the boy has grown up and is moving on: 'The boy who tried to vanish / To the future or past / Is no longer alone / Among the dragonflies.' Saying goodbye w/ him, I'm unexpectedly moved.

When you think of great live rock albums, you think of At Fillmore East by The Allman Brothers and Live/Dead by the Grateful Dead (I also think of the still under-appreciated Band of Gypsys, but that's another matter). What makes this record so rich is that it teaches you what the 'jam' is and what it isn't, or at least what it oughtn't be. To jam is to improvise w/ an emphasis on extension rather than mere invention, a dangerous game to play if you don't know where or why to lean into the moment, i.e., flow states abased by noodling. But the Dead are tuned in here. Their jamming is a soulful, cerebral, and salubrious piece of the psychedelic puzzle, w/ intimations of the black church on 'Turn on Your Love Light' & modernism on 'Feedback.'

For anyone interested in the history of hip-hop, and therefore the history of popular music from 1973 onward, this is essential listening, if only for their cover of Jerry Lordan's 'Apache,' containing the most important breakbeat this side of James Brown's 'Funky Drummer.' The rest of the original eight-track set is an underrated yet underwhelming collection of instrumentals, underrated b/c they ought to be heard, possessing some real-deal energy, especially on 'Last Bongo in Belgium,' but underwhelming b/c you're almost waiting for the rapping to start. What's weird is the sense you get that this record was made to be sampled, that the point of the project was to supply the future of music w/ a plethora of percussive possibilities & breakdowns.

'That's all we wanna be, watch us freak.' I want to dig this record way more than I do. The tribal percussion is poised and melodic, and the lyrics are in the vein of hardcore rather than metal, all of which should abet the perfect storm for me to make an exception for this album and group as a non-lover of the heavy genre. But metal in the end is metal, and Roots has the same repetitive and obsessive deficiencies as Slayer or Cannibal Corpse. Even on a track like 'Ratamahatta,' the indigenous drumming does not provide enuf of a reprieve from the sound that only a handful of bands manage to convince me of: Black Sabbath, above all, maybe Motörhead, Ministry? It isn't my sort of anger, I guess - too tunnel-visioned, sabotaging our breath.

Two songs into Arrival, and you've gone from horny and weird to at home in a song that, like A-ha's 'Take On Me' or Eurythmic's 'Sweet Dreams,' isn't possible to hear for the first time. B/c 'Dancing Queen' is a happy song - it may be THE happy song - I was surprised by some of the introspection the album swaggers: 'No more carefree laughter / Silence ever after / Walking thru an empty house / Tears in my eyes.' That's not particularly interesting broodiness, but this is pop music, so it doesn't need to be - it's just gotta have that thing we call pop magic. And some of these tracks have it, 'Why Did It Have To Be Me?' specifically. But plenty don't, and I'm left reckoning that ABBA is just a weak derivative of The Beach Boys and Fleetwood Mac.

Somewhat similar to Dylan's Another Side, when Songs from a Room was initially released, it was perceived as a letdown: too dully introspective, not much like the first record, which had you dancing to the folksy rhythms of a new guy on the scene. In other words, not just a letdown, but a depressing and lonely affair: 'I sing this for the crickets / I sing this for the army / I sing this for your children / And for all who do not need me.' But while it's true that nothing here is particularly vivacious, it's often unusually vivid and it's always gorgeous. Lyrically, he really is a masterful artisan: 'I cannot follow you, my love / You cannot follow me / I am the distance you put between / All of the moments that will be.' That's almost written verse...almost.

I know IDM stands for 'intelligent dance music,' but this feels like industrial dance music to me: the sound of a factory waking up a night discovering its hidden sources of rhythm and pleasure. I'm not sure what the 'concept' of the record is besides the dancehall being haunted. I guess the vibes of the thing are Halloweenish, and there're a whole lotta sounds that can be considered menacing or ominous - there's a persistent sensation that the air is being violently, stealthily sliced - but for the most part I just listen to it as a collection of interesting, at times imaginative and groovy, electronic & ambient music. It's more 'soundtrack' than 'concept,' since the whole time I was compelled to seek the apposite scene: someone running for cover.

'Afraid and shy, I let my chance go by / A chance that you might love me too.' Tho there's so much more of this record that's essential not just for the learning of it but the pleasure of it, that line, as Ray sings it, is, for me, one of the great moments of the American arts. Perhaps it's that I'd never have thought to describe his voice as 'afraid' or 'shy,' tho it may be exactly that: the way he pulls and pushes, toils and invents, evinces the elements of fear and introversion. In other words, soul, even at its most upbeat and extroverted, is the cry of inwardness achieving innerness. Ray didn't just possess the power to reinvent country and western music as black art: he changed music. The liminality of the human voice now had its expression.

To say that Zappa and The Mothers of Invention were w/o precedent would not be quite correct. The Kinks were making similarly satirical rock music, tho their Britishness reined in the experimental aspects of their invention. B/c he's American, Zappa's will for the avant-garde is unguarded and full-spectrum: Freak Out! is, compositionally and lyrically, as in-your-face as the best punk. While Ray Davies cultivates a coy, restrained Britishness, Zappa develops an extroverted brand of the American cutting-edge. My favorite tracks on this debut, which I admire but do not love to death - it's got too many songs that are mere novelties - are the ones that engage an American aesthetic - doo-wop + early rock 'n' roll - ironically but lovingly.

'Exxon and on and on and on'; 'Athletes and entertainers / Have become the minstrels of commercials'; 'Why most people think Central America means Kansas / Socialism means un-American / And Apartheid is a new headache remedy.' There're few hip-hop records THIS political, where every line critiques the system and there's no break from a penetrative analysis of society. It'd be easy to dismiss this record as a dated phenomenon - T.V. is the drug of the nation? - ha, how 'bout brain rot and American fascism? But Michael Franti is too original to be overlooked, a breathing composite of Gil Scott Heron, Chuck D, and George Carlin. And when he sounds too much like the Public Enemy front man, Franti can confide in Rono Tse's industrial refreshments.

Like James Brown before him, Fela was orchestrator, arranger, & vocalist, so that when you listen to his music you're really listening to the music of a collective consciousness. For every Maceo (saxophonist) James had, Fela had his Tony Allen (drummer). Allen was, to be fair, director of the music, but Fela was the mind and cultural foreman of Afrobeat. Unlike American funk, heralded by Brown, Afrobeat is overtly political, i.e., you're not getting 'I'm Black and I'm Proud' on Zombie, you're getting an immediate, immersive response to the situation at hand. In this sense, Afrobeat is like reggae, tho the sound is derived from jazz and funk, not rock 'n' roll. It so happens that Zombie is an all-time classic of the genre, a rhythmic + shrewd sensation.

'My words are dead / Falling like feathers to the floor.' A more shoegazey Stone Roses, which means they've groove even tho they etherealize, Ride is an intensity I wasn't quite prepared for. In particular, Loz Colbert bangs and booms on the drums - I mean really going for it, on the sweeter tracks too, ballads like 'In a Different Place,' 'Polar Bear.' I guess what I appreciate most about this record is the knowledge that psychedelia wasn't over and done w/ during the 90s: that The Byrds's vision still had some pulse. Ride are gospelers like Spiritualized, not actual Christian pushers but impactors of religious sentiment. Right, I'll take their medicine, just not all the time. The ride's sometimes to nowhere, and I'd like to have my bearings back.

'I want to white out / I want to white out.' Deeply lyrical and messy thru and thru, Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers is the greatest, most touching collapse in rock history this side of Skip Spence's Oar. And to be fair, as much as I adhere to Oar, it's the more listenable affair, somehow, someway, still in a mode we could call 'pop.' 'W/o my friends I'd be / Swept up by the wind.' Alex Chilton doesn't just depend on a little help from his friends: he really fucking needs them. His soulful voice is here both soulful and ghostly, as he maintains a register of a weeping angel, i.e., 'Holocaust' is a haunting masterpiece like no other (except for maybe 'Kanga Roo'). You know when people refer to their all-timers as the 'Truth'? Well, this record is the Truth.

'Leaving the valley / Fucking out of sight / I'll go back to Cali / Where I can sleep out every night.' Her looks remind me of Frances McDormand, and her voice is a power of understatement: it's not a matter of her not doing too much, but doing what she can, which is a lot thru a fragile little. Gil's a rare artist for whom the progression from quiet to quieter is an increase in power and meaning - that she cultivates her dominion via the most serene and steady singing I've heard. And she knows she's a quiet queen: 'I want to sing that rock 'n' roll / I want to 'lectrify my soul / 'Cause everybody been making a shout / So big and loud, been drownin' me out.' She's like Audrey Hepburn doing 'Moon River' + the lilting and aching of gutting country.

'Then you will know what nitro means / You'll live like there's no tomorrow.' Instead of smelling like teen spirit, this is a long swig of 'youth energy,' i.e., 'nitro': it's more than just a smash, it's a demolition, a fucking takeover of mind, body, and spirit. 'You stupid dumb-shit goddamn motherfucker.' At one level, The Offspring are dumb, and not like Ramones dumb but rather Def Leppard dumb. But they're actually pretty smart, not only b/c they have the right attitude towards life - let's get something outta it while we can - but b/c they're musically a (s)mash up of hardcore and grunge: the speed & optimism of the former, the dread/angst of the latter. 'Think I'm on a roll, but I think it's kinda weak / Sayin' all I know is I gotta get away from me.'

Arena rock, prog rock, soft rock, anything but the progenitors of punk rock, even tho that's how we brand The Who. Is it merely b/c they smashed up their instruments and played loudly that they assume that title? I see punk in The Kinks and The VU, not this wasteland of generic vocals and canned guitar licks. This is one of those records that sounds good but does not, in the end, feel good: too many cliched crescendos, too many moments when the music drops out and Daltrey sings his small heart out. Lyrically, it's awash w/ inane mush and mawkish monuments: 'I'll sing my song to the free, to the free.' Keith Moon was the only genius of the group, but he doesn't have much space to explore. Honestly, they smack of The Eagles.