Reviews by verlainemorrison96

While I'll always be missing something since I never saw them live, I harbor no misgivings when I say that American Beauty is not only an excellent album but an American classic - a wise, lyrical, and subtly mysterious ten-track set that only gets better w/ age. If it seems awfully straightforward, that's b/c psychedelia is more than speculative experimentation - it can also be rendered via fairly traditional interpretations of folk and country. It isn't lost on me that much of this, especially 'Ripple,' speaks to me b/c of my halfway hippie-childhood, but I dare you to underrate lyrics like: 'Then please don't be surprised / When you find me dreaming too'; 'And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung.' +, it trucks and ponders all at once. ✌️

The Genesis vocalist narrowed his progressive tendencies on this widely popular album, gravitating to an amalgam of pop, funk, and some sort of British heartland folk. Shades of Duran Duran, Stevie Wonder, and Bruce Springsteen all figure in the makeup of this record, tho consciously or not I'm unsure. The trouble is that he's neither Stevie nor the Boss, and while he's squarely superior to Duran Duran, he's just as forgettable. I don't think it's a matter of the album's unfavorable 80s affect - I'm not one to decry a period piece. I think it boils down to 1) his pretensions and lyrical failings; 2) his cheesiness and prosaic vocals; and 3) the knowledge that there's way better music out there. In short, it bored and chagrinned me.

'I feel weird.' Definitely weird, Drunk is a splattering of 23 relatively short tracks, all of them virtuosic in one way or another, some speaking to some sort of relevance, others sheerly odd and abstract. A playful lyric: 'Thank God for technology 'cause where would we be / If we couldn't tweet our thoughts.' Objectively, while impressive, it's not as profound as it tends to make itself out to be, and it goes to show that Thundercat is an inventive bassist but not necessarily a resourceful songwriter. With that said, it has a sound that's undeniably nostalgic for me - a drift of alternative funk and R&B that artists like Vulfpeck and Frank Ocean also exemplified. We even covered 'Them Changes' in college. I'm thus liable to overrate it. Oh well.

It could be that this is Common's best album, tho Resurrection is his most classic and Like Water for Chocolate his most essential. An authentic folk experience, Be is artfully produced, boasts a variety of flows, commands memorable choruses, and has enuf off-key rhyming to offset Common's cliché moments. The Chi-town native is like Simon & Garfunkel in that he gets away w/ corniness b/c he's never pretentious and he's not corny all of the time. For every 'The present is a gift and I just wanna be' there's a 'We talk shit, play lotto, and buy German beers / It's so black packed w/ action that's affirmative.' For the rap skeptic, Be is a brilliant place to start - if not only for its brevity - but it also convinces hip-hop elites and rhyme-junkies.

'Chill' is seldom haunting, and it's almost never visceral, but The VU typify both of those qualities on their third release, the 'chillest' of their five, the one that can be said to approximate easy listening, but which nonetheless cultivates a sense of the desperate and the tragic. Lou Reed's lyricism is as clear it's ever been, cutting to the bone, not only making something out very little but having the heart to respect the immensity of our living years: 'Candy says I hate the big decisions / That cause endless revisions / In my mind'; 'I wore my teeth in my hands / So I could mess the hair of the night'; 'I'm set free / I'm set free to find a new illusion.' And as always, tho unlike everything before or since, The VU don't just imply - they live - rock 'n' roll.

'Here's a chance to dance our way / Out of our constrictions.' If you ever needed proof that funk was our very best salubrious and patriotic wager, One Nation Under A Groove would be your decisive testimony: 'W/ the united funk we can fly.' I'd press you to take them seriously: imagine what national politics could achieve under a groove rather than aligned w/ shitty powers [see '...(The Doo-Doo Chasers)']. Yes, the songs are jumbo, but for once the avant-garde - b/c that's what they really are ('Fried Ice Cream is a reality!') - is for fun and wholeness rather than masturbatory chops + licks. And don't get it twisted, it's one of the all-time rock records: 'We're gonna rock and roll the crowd / Just watch them dance, watch them dance.'

Knopfler must know that he's not as cool as a real jazz or blues cat, but his living depends on the pursuit of that sort of hipness. Mix in a Dylanesque vocal style, and you get something that's not only boring but unoriginal. I don't need all musical ventures to be fully authentic, but when it's empty - when the bullshit isn't a form of ironic or satiric critique but coincides w/ a colorless + tedious smugness - I can't get down. B/c besides 'Southbound Again,' all the tracks are too long and the lyricism somehow manages to be both clunky and chic: 'You think I care about your reaction / You think I don't understand / All you wanted was a piece of the action / Now you talk about another man'; 'Greasy, greasy, greasy hair, easy smile.' The point?

It makes more than a little sense that Missy's debut is bookended by Busta, that other rapper whose ad-libs don't ornament but substantiate: 'ficky-ficky-ficky-ficky-ficky-ficky-ficky'; 'Iza bah bah zah zay / Iza zah zah zah zay'; 'Bam bam bam bam bili bili bom / Bam bili bili bili bili bili bili bom.' Like B.I.G., Elliott is so rhythmically gifted that one is inclined to pass over her lyricism, a shame since she's invested in rhymed content as well as sound. Like Lauryn, she raps and sings, often saving her best writing for the non-rapping parts: 'You don't wanna date / No ifs ands or waits, it's over babe.' And like none, she essentially invented vibe in the hip-hop context. I have but one doubt w/ this one, notably that it's a bit one-note, but a classic it is.

Tho Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks are even more realized than Highway 61 - b/c fiercely personal - nada in Dylan's oeuvre approaches the iconicity of his second electric installment, not Bringing It All Back Home w/ 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' and 'Mr. Tambourine Man' or Freewheelin' w/ 'Blowin' in the Wind.' This isn't where it all began w/ this artist, but it is where something remarkably new - dare I say mind-expansive? - began in popular music: pointed yet abstract lyricism, long + subtly crescendoing tracks, and a bluesy literariness. Worthy or not of the Nobel Prize, he's the pivotal limit of modernism: 'You've been thru all all of / F. Scott Fitzgerald's books'; 'And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain's tower.'

It's background music, not only b/c LBM famously backed Paul Simon on his seminal Graceland, but b/c it's music of the background, to be preciser. That is, the songs comprise a world unto themselves, a world at a distance from our own and yet too full to be intangible or abstract. These a cappella performances overflow w/ a meticulous peace, and tho there are elements of despair and joy, trouble and celebration, the main ingredient is stability, a settledness and serenity equipped w/ a vital outlet. Chanting is repetitious by nature, but no track here wants a necessary variety. My only fuss is that the accessibility of the record is finally a bit soft, so that, over the course of an entire album, the tranquility it offers wanes from robust to kinda wimpy.

Danny Brown's favorite album of all time, revered by Robert Plant and The Stone Roses, Forever Changes is a cult classic and yet more than that. I don't know how you can listen to it w/o converting immediately to its wit, its warmth, its realism, its inventive-never-indulgent instrumentation, and the chaotic tensions it promulgates. Is there another release from the 60s that so masterfully negotiates starry-eyedness and dark absurdism? 'Sitting on a hillside / Watching all the people die'; 'Oh the snot has caked against my pants / It has turned into crystal'; 'And that's all that lives is gonna die.' It isn't 60s protest music or even psychedelia - it's heartfelt, desperate, and utterly gorgeous 70s disillusionment foreshadowed in '67 LA. None like it.

'Breathe, breathe in the air / Don't be afraid to care.' That's how this record opens, an album unexpectedly clad w/ wisdom and advice for the everyday + spiritual. Indeed, it often reads as a self-help book backed by packages of funk, gospel, and rock: 'The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older / Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.' This aphoristic kind of lyricism - the sort you might find in a trashy collection of poetry that's more Ryan Holiday than Wallace Stevens - yet manages to avoid a collapse into the maudlin, and in fact inspires/emboldens. Wish You Were Here is, for me, still their best release - bigger, bolder, quieter, wiser - but I greatly admire the sincerity packed into these 42 mins. +, it's too classic to decry.

'Parks, hotels, and palaces / (Europe endless).' About as bourgeois Euro-centric as it gets, but also frank and reflective in a Wildean sense: 'Even the greatest stars / Fix their face in the looking glass'; 'We look around / And change our pose / We are showroom dummies'; 'In Vienna we sit in a late-night café / Straight connection, TEE.' Kraftwerk's masterstroke is an irrefragable annotation to this ongoing moment of globalized capitalism, a stretch of time witness to mere simulacrums and postures. In other words, as I came to the end of the record, I was filled w/ a deep sense of sadness, especially as the album gradually grew into a kind of meta-medley: tracks that blent into one another and sadly, tho beautifully, recited its beginning.

Artsy, sure, but not as postmodern or experimental as you might assume: these Clevelanders know what a hook is, they know that the avant-garde can coexist w/ something that's as immediate as it is cerebral. The aptest comp for this record is Beefheart's Safe as Milk, a record that endures on the margins of the very weird and the unusually catchy, held together by odd, memorable, and often farcical lyrics: 'I can't wink / I can't blink / I like The Kinks / I need a drink'; 'Techniramic Heartache (TM) / Out in the Real World.' 'Sentimental Journey,' the most out-there of the tracks, is flat and pretentious - David Thomas is at his best as a songwriter not a slam poet - but the rest is a welcome balance of hard-hitting punk and erratic signals.

I don't always know what to do w/ 'cute' things, especially when the object essentially satisfies both definitions of the adjective: a cunning or shrewd commodity, on the one hand, and something that's immaturely attractive, on the other. That's Violent Femmes's eponymous debut in a nutshell, a record that's simultaneously clever and innocent, sharp-witted and yet wet behind the ears. Some of the tracks here I can get down w/, even enjoy in a real way, especially 'Please Do Not Go,' 'Confessions,' and 'Good Feeling.' +, it impresses me that this came out in the early 80s, foreshadowing a 90s aesthetics embodied by acts like Neutral Milk Hotel. But it also fails to do much for me - they aren't a wannabe VU, but come on, they kinda are, dig?

It's still the best to come out of the CBGB thing and simply one of the greatest albums of all time. For me, it ranks w/ the great jazz recordings - not only b/c Verlaine was listening to Ayler, Coltrane, and Miles, tho that's a piece of the mystery, but b/c it's high art in a way that few of its kind are. On Marquee Moon, virtuosity merely sets the table - it's never an end in itself. It's the thinking man's punk rock at the same time that it's for anyone heroical enuf to believe in the ecstatic and limitless transport of a bare and effortless night out. The lyrics are abstract but they aren't ever obscure; the guitar playing is complex but never distorted: safely ablaze like a hearth but always inducing you to step and to fall where you hadn't.

'She was born in November 1963 / The day Aldous Huxley died.' That'd be Nov 22, the same day JFK was assassinated. Known for brightness, Crow is also a subtle and at times hilarious lyricist, as that snatch evinces, as well as an exasperated realist w/ troubles and questions abounding: 'Well, got a brother / He's got real problems / Heroin - no / There's just no stopping him tonight / And I won't cry anymore.' In that sense, it's pop and it's not, not b/c pop music can't deal w/ dark matters but b/c she negotiates them as Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young might: w/ misdirection and irony that yet doesn't detract from her sincerity. I'm aware that she collaborated w/ other songwriters, but her vocals signify that the lyrics come from her own store.

Zeppelin's double album is double the fun. The innovators of heavy metal or hard rock, whichever moniker you prefer, are decidedly less in the mood to riff about medievalisms than they are to groove, funk, and activate that blues muscle that dips into gospel - 'It's got to be, it's got to be my Jesus' - while maintaining a fidelity to nightlife festivities and goofy relaxation. A track like 'Houses of the Holy,' which has the nominal makings of a weary trip into British lore, is nothing more than a warm invitational: 'So let me take you, let me take you to the movies.' Even 'Kashmir,' the hit featuring that slow and fertile drumming from Bonham, is somehow not the synthetic thing it could be. In short, no Zeppelin record makes me feel so good as it.

'You can always pull out / If you like it too much.' Shoegazey yet not quite in the clouds, Garbage's eponymous debut is strange w/o coming apart at its seams. Shirley Mason may yelp about being the 'queerest of the queer,' but this is no more than a pop record, and I don't mean that as a bad thing. Somewhere between the Cocteau Twins, The Stone Roses, and a far more reined-in Kate Bush, you can see their influence on bands like Broadcast and artists ranging from Avril Lavigne to Courtney Barnett. Ultimately tho, the lyrics and the dubious angst they express don't covert me: 'If holy is as holy does / This house would burn straight down to hell'. At times it's a fun record. Problem is, I don't think they were going for fun as much as they were going for weird.

Every track on this album, one of the all-time reggae records, bum-rushes the political system, an expected upshot of roots music, but Burning Spear offers his listener history lessons as well: 'They been talking about William Gordon / They been talking about Norman Washington Manley / Including Bustamente / No one remember old Marcus Garvey.' Suddenly, Jamaica is far more than the land that's exported reggae and ganja - it's a country w/ a story I'd like to read more about. Instrumentally, it's nothing special, tho the horns are a nice touch. What makes it stand out are Spear's vocals and the fact that he's a kind of Talmudic psalmist, intent on chanting more than singing, just as the music syncopates more than it melodizes. Great stuff.