Reviews by verlainemorrison96

Preaching? I don't think so. Thinking? Always, but that does not seem to be its source. Solidifying? Yessir. Letting go? Absolutely. Kiwanuka does a remarkable job marrying the sentiments of an indie band like Radiohead and a soul-barer like Bill Withers. For that, we should commend him, but it takes more than an impressive incorporation of influences to make great or even decent music. Fortunately, Kiwanuka passes the ear-test as well: the record is loaded w/ more than a share of hard-hitters and soulful rock tunes that don't only give pleasure but make it as well. Its only want is lyrical: 'I thought I could break away / I hope I fall in love today'; 'Am I a hero? / Am I a hero now?'; 'You are my air to breathe / You're just like a honey bee.' Hm.

'No Asian fire will leave us dire / Born again to Asian lion'; 'Worker strikes are back again'; 'I want you each and all to switch your tiny mind on.' Five years the senior of Bend it Like Beckham, Cornershop's third studio album, a more graceful vision of representational art than that classic film, is the best example of Britpop I've heard and it's not particularly close. (Oasis is really something else, so I exclude them.) Peppering the record w/ various fusions, instrumental interludes, and Allen Ginsberg, Cornershop did the impossible before M.I.A. managed it: pen socially-aware bangers that are natural and bighearted. Yes, we have punk and we have hip-hop, but they bum-rush the establishment - this speaks softly and yet I dig their moment.

According to Bowie, Aladdin Sane is better than The Rise and Fall b/c it's 'more informed by rock 'n' roll.' That's probably true - 'Watch That Man' is more rockin' than anything off the predecessor - but it's also more in touch w/ free jazz, e.g. Mike Garson's piano on the title track, and is harder than anything he'd done before, e.g. 'Panic in Detroit,' 'Cracked Actor.' It’s hard in a way Deep Purple never could be: giddily heedful of The New York Dolls's innovations of a glam toughness, Bowie spawns one of his essential albums. And yet, it's not as perfect as his late, formally brazen 70s work or as fresh as Ziggy Stardust. Bowie's conceptual narratives have their limits, and I'm more moved by the production of Station to Station, Low, "Heroes."

'Let's forget about the tongue tied lightning / Let's undress like cross-eyed strangers'; 'You have to learn how to die / If you want to be alive'; 'Strung down you cheeks / Bitter melodies turning your orbit around.' It makes very little sense to call Wilco the American Radiohead since, tho they both make pop songs that aren't always intelligible, the Chicagoans have every intention to vitalize their obscurity whereas the Brits are amnesiac thumb-twiddlers. Tweedy is a far better lyricist than Yorke, possessing the rare knack to turn a phrase that's felt before it's understood, or to reorder cliché just enuf for it to hit more profoundly. If only for 'Jesus etc.,' a country-rock classic that rivals the Dead's 'Ripple' for sheer beauty, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is glorious.

The Arctic Monkeys's debut is a rare paradigm for rock music that's also + before anything else dance music, thanks to Alex Turner's rhythmic sense and funky locution along with Matt Helders's catchy drumming. 'Get off the bandwagon and put down the handbook'; 'Get on your dancing shoes / You sexy little swine.' This means that the band doesn't really give a shit about melodies, and this elision of melody often smacks of a crutch rather than an innovation, but these songs get you off your ass in a real way. Even at their aberrantly contemplative, Turner is the voice of fun and the wisdom to omit all seriousness: 'Oh, those silly boys in blue / Well, they won't catch me and you.' I prefer The Libertines's self-titled second, but this survives.

'You're still a pushover / For passionate people.' This is good pop music, a fusion of therapeutic landscapes and Talking-Heads quirkiness. Opening w/ a legitimately consoling track - 'Oh, sugar / Give into me / You're just having a bad dream / Of ringing alarms'; 'Lean into me / There's always a side door / Into the dark' - the band then steadily reaches into their bag of percussive dreams and makes a record that's at once soothing and hard-nosed. James Murphy is a real artist in that he sounds like no one b/c he sounds like everyone: in other words, tho LCD has clear soundalikes, they possess a magnitude that can only imply a deep musical entrenchment. It would take too long to get to the bottom of their influences - a good thing.

'It would be of small avail / To talk of magic in the air'; 'Gunpowder, gelatine / Dynamite w/ a laser beam'; 'Synchronize your minds and see / The beast within him rise.' The once progers are now wannabe showstoppers, but the prog in them won't die, as those snatches of lyricism illustrate. It's a shame b/c Freddie Mercury has one of the great voices in rock history, and yet I can't claim to be moved by something this repetitively crescendoing and theatrical. At their rare tolerable ('Killer Queen'), they're a somewhat fresh amalgam of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, w/ harmonies inspired by The Beach Boys. Mostly tho, they're lost not knowing what to do or where to go: technically proficient, the band however never dramatizes w/ a soul.

Metal/hard rock about parties, girls (a million of them, + w/ rhythm), and all manners of a 'touch too much,' Highway to Hell boasts peculiar love songs and not very good ones: an abstract 'she' pervades the album inanely and boringly. My issue w/ AC/DC is that they don't do one thing all that well: riffing, raspy vocals, choruses, backbeats, don't-give-a-fuck-attitudes. I know they brand themselves as 'simply rock and roll,' but this primitivism doesn't guarantee authenticity or good song writing: 'We're rising, falling, like at sea / You're lookin' so good under me'; 'You can throw me lefts / And you can throw me rights / But where were you last night?’ This isn't 'back to the basics' (that'd be the Ramones), it's back to the same shit, over and over.

Murmur remains R.E.M.'s 'finest hour,' but there is something to say in re the group's first refusal to 'murmur' any longer: Stipe clears his throat w/o an embarrassing or pedestrian devotedness to radical politics. What he's learned, or at the very least learned to express, are dialectical materialism and the structures of history: 'Sugar, cane, and coffee cup / Copper, steel, and cattle / An annotated history'; 'There's something going on that wasn't here before . . . There's something going on that's not quite right.' W/ this said, their political clear-eyedness fits right in w/ their new musical program to be catchier and happier than ever. Like a Born in the U.S.A., Document is this group's daring attempt to be more accessible AND more meaningful.

Fogerty's voice has traveled the airwaves into our subconscious and is, at this point, a statement in itself, but the uncredited genius behind this album is Fogerty's guitar playing, at once simple, vigorous, and persuasive. I hate to discount the rest of the group, and I know they must be essential in their own ways, but CCR is a remarkable proposal b/c John Fogerty literally does it all: never backed by another member's voice until the very last track, he strums and notates these songs to classic status. W/ lyrics like 'Old Cody Junior took me over / Said, "You're gonna find the world is smolderin',"' one can only admire how much of an influence he must've been on Springsteen and the folk literati who wanted to be more down to earth than impressive.

'Hubby's gone away / And while the cat's away / The mice are gonna play.' The Kinks's Rubber Soul, tho as a lyricist, Ray Davies was more biting and deliberate than either Lennon or McCartney, e.g., compare 'Session Man' to 'Paperback Writer.' It seems to me that The Kinks were the first to see that 'conceptual' music could most easily get going from a satirical and/or critical perspective, preferably in relation to commercial society/capitalism: 'Why should he care if he is hated in his home / 'Cause he's gotta a house in the country, / And a big sports car'; 'And I can't sail my yacht / He's taken everythin' I've got.' As such, the most soulful/bluesy tracks like 'Rainy Day in June' and 'You're Looking Fine' unfortunately feel out of place. Still, nice.

'If I could be for just one little hour / A cute-cute in a stupid ass way.' Scott Walker is like a midway point between Tom Jones and Associates lead man Billy Mackenzie, until he goes country on the Tim-Hardin cover and gives you his best Harry Nilsson. As theatrical as Screamin' Jay Hawkins, but in his own way a man very much keen on authenticity and pushing things only as far as they need to go, Walker is an excellent comedian - 'And never to be next / Oh, never to be next / next!' - w/o collapsing into sheer farce. As a vocalist, he can't really be doubted, but he doesn't coast on mere talent since he's a helluva songwriter and when he covers a song he covers the right one (save 'The Girls And The Dogs'). No Bowie w/o this Ohioan, too.

W/ not a whole lot to hold onto, m b v gets its power from the band's honed and oceanic guitarwork: its vague and muddled sound yet displays a true-to-life vastness, an atmosphere of droning as well as drowning. The group, like Spiritualized, has always been impressively dedicated to the production of their craft, and I admire their ability to engender a music that feels nearly impossible to make, but shoegaze is, by definition, a genre dangerously at risk of ethereal stagnation, and on their third record, the band by all means stagnates. I say 'by all means' b/c they do it well, and I could get down w/ its most songy tracks like 'new you,' but m b v is no Loveless. It's honestly lifeless and, at the end of the day, kinda bad for you. Bad meaning good?

Outrageous, satirical, realist, and forthright, Eminem's magnum opus only gets better w/ age, no matter how 'of its time' his hatreds and vulgarisms are. 'You want me to fix up lyrics while our president gets his dick sucked?' Right he is to call out the engine of hypocrisy his country often runs on, but his wit and penned social-awareness only works b/c, as a technical rapper, he's indisputably a genius. It's more than the rhyming, tho 'taught 'em to swear' and 'daughter to wear,' or 'two kids, sixteen,' 'M-16,' 'ten clips each,' 'them shits reach,' 'six kids each,' 'Bill Clint's speech,' 'fix these streets' are prolific displays of the skillset. It's beyond his flow as well. It's his tone, as angry as it is resigned: urgent yet nonchalant, it's a dosage of deep clarity.

'Show me magic'; 'You're the battery incarnate, I'm an innocent man'; 'You know we're drowning in designer ice cream.' Guitar-wise, this feels like My Bloody Valentine, while lyrically it has the mundane absurdism of bands like The Flaming Lips or Animal Collective. I guess that adds up to a 'logic' that we can baptize as 'fuzzy,' but I'd opt for a word like 'faint' or 'weak': it's not ambiguous as much as it's slight, lacking a substantiality that justifies their posture of cool. B/c that's the central problem of the record as I see it. It has decent tracks like 'Frisbee,' 'Gathering Moss, or 'Bad Behavior, songs that nicely recall 60s pop, but there's something in Gruff Rhys's voice and the overall tenor of the album that reeks of an unjustified, restless hipness.

After Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles broadcasted the most important male voice in the history of popular music. I'd like to add Robert Johnson's, but his is not a crossover in the way Louis's or Ray's is. Then again, perhaps 'crossover' is not precise enuf - above all else, Ray is the foremost genius of integration, engendering a style that fused blues, gospel, jazz, and those early expressions of rock 'n' roll: soul music, in other words. If you require evidence of his unusual and necessary power, listen to the final moments of 'Just for a Thrill' when the man pushes and grunts his way to a sublime capture of feeling. This record is particularly thrilling, featuring jazz greats like Clark Terry, Paul Gonsalves, and Zoot Sims on side one.

'You have not been paying attention.' Contrary to his detractors, Yorke is not a whiner, a moper, or even a lamenter: he's a nuanced and perpetual droner, a strangely aloof and not very emotional castaway. Unfortunately, he's also a very bad poet, pretentious and threadbare at the same time. When the band decides the write a song, as they do w/ 'Go To Sleep,' they are tolerable and moderately successful. When they do not, which is the case w/ much of Hail To The Thief, they're pretty unbearable. It's the worst Radiohead I've heard (I haven't listened to The King of Limbs) b/c it's not even remotely fun: 'Why so green / And lonely, and lonely / And lonely.' Ya know, I can dig the darkness, just not the weary or densely drab. Faugh!

'It's noble and it's brutal, it distorts and deranges / And it wrenches you up and you're left like a zombie.' Like A-ha's 'Take On Me,' 'Sweet Dreams' is heard more than it's attended, but unlike the Norwegian outfit, Eurythmics can make a full album, or at the very least, a respectable one. Besides the international hit, the record has tracks like 'Love Is a Stranger,' 'The Walk,' 'Jennifer,' songs that don't send a shiver up your spine but are good enuf. Nothing here isn't catchy, and some of it can even be called sexy, but too much is uppity and, in the end, like a mealy apple: it's all bountiful 'til it's exposed to the better air and presents you with something edible but no longer delicious. In fact, it's too 'eurythmic,' too tepidly symmetrical. K?

Folk-jazz is hard to pull off, since the two genres are antipodal to a degree, but John Martyn does it as well as anyone this side of Nick Drake and Tim Buckley, not to mention Nina Simone. There's no doubt that this is soulful and beautiful music, but it's also a slow-down-get-your-groove-on-thing, a trip into the strange and mythically reposed: 'I'd Rather Be The Devil (Devil Got My Woman),' 'Go Down Easy' (Hejira-like), 'Dreams By The Sea.' As the record goes on, it doesn't exactly convince you that it boasts a single great track, tho 'Over The Hill' and 'May You Never' come pretty close, but it has so much variety, virtuosity, and believable vibrancy that you can both admire it from afar and devour its emotive riches. Just not a go-to album.

'Baby, I got my facts learned real good right now.' Bruce's heaviest record, not lyrically - that'd be Nebraska - but musically, that is, in terms of what it means for the heartland hero to rock out. 'Adam Raised a Cain' features his most impressively hard-hitting guitar playing, while a track like 'Something in the Night' boasts that distant wail we know from 'Jungleland' tho w/ even more desperation. I know it's in the title, but the truth is that this where the Boss doesn't just learn how to be darker - he let's that darkness speak for itself: 'Now some guys, they give up living / And start dying little by little, piece by piece'; 'End of the day, factory whistle cries / Men walk thru these gates w/ death in their eyes.' No writer of America can ignore that for long.