Reviews by verlainemorrison96

Like the hole burned in the luxury-store bag featured on the album cover, this record left a gash in my brain for want of substance and really anything worth an ear's time. MJ Cole may produce, but he doesn't induce - that is, he doesn't stimulate or influence besides the brief moment of witless body moving. What's particularly awful, especially on the big tracks like 'Crazy Love,' 'I See,' and 'Sincere - Re-Cu'd,' is the posturing of some sort of R&B-suavity which not only doesn't exist but is nearly parodied, so generic and uninspired are the vocal performances. 'Rough Out Here' borders on a caricature of Curtis Mayfield while 'Slum King' is hackneyed take on reggae politics. 'Do you feel the vibes?' I do not. Bad for the body and the soul.

'P-Funk, uncut funk, The Bomb.' Authentic having-a-helluva-time music is harder to come by than you may think - it's either qualified by the tragedies inherent to blues music, or it falls far short of something eternally superb. But Parliament is only a good time, which is not to say that it's ahistorical or somehow willfully uniformed. It's to say that funk needed to go to outer space in order to effect this sort of unbridled sanguinity: 'Starchild here, citizens of the universe / I bring forth to you the good time.' Besides the obvious influence this had on L.A. hip-hop (Dre's 'Let Me Ride,' explicitly), 'The Bomb' is also a revelation of production, and in its own way, it's the revolutionary outlook incarnate: I dare you to have an ounce of worry left.

From the jump, Spiritualized proclaims an ethos of layering and hard work: this isn't any run-of-the-mill production, this is a group that takes seriously the sounds they aim to achieve. That achievement, capsuled in '1 tablet 70 min,' is not only real but often breathtakingly complete. Like My Bloody Valentine, the intention appears to be to fill the space entirely, yet there's always some invisible room left for the advantages of silence. Striking too are Jason Pierce's lyrics, which run the gamut of the abstract and tangible: 'Warm's the dope running down my spine'; 'Just me, my spike in my arm, and my spoon.' Simultaneously the Pet Sounds and Velvet Underground and Nico of the 90s, it's mournfully - brokenly - spiritual. And real heavy.

'That cloud, that cloud / It looks like Ireland / Come on and blow it a kiss now.' Kate Bush may make demands on the listener, but that's a welcome incursion. She also makes love w/ her listener, swaggering a voice that's soulfully operatic and outlandish. Terms like 'performative' and 'embodied' have invaded academic criticism - overused and now mere placeholders - but Hounds of Love is exactly that. It's literary performance - it even flirts w/ prog sensibilities, tho thankfully never succumbs to them - but it's also something w/ marrow and muscle. The second half is definitely wackier than the first, and not always pleasurably eccentric, but it's mostly quirky w/o being quackery. At her best, she's a rare pop artist & a very cool lady.

Knowing that the Mekons are Jonathan Franzen's favorite band didn't put me in the right mood exactly, but just 30 seconds into Fear and Whiskey I realized they too were a band for me. In a sense, they're the Grateful Dead of punk rock: a collective more than a band that incorporates elements of country into the schematics of their original approach and emphasizes the live show. But they're also something else entirely: I'm assuming they do not have legions of fans but thousands in the know, and while the Dead are essentially a live band w/ album footnotes, the Mekons are real studio folk. Full of warmth, humor, modesty, they yet know they're onto something. 'I wanted to say fall in love w/ me / I wanted to say fall in love / It'll be alright.'

Unlike The Smiths who are a melange of Morrissey's cynicism and Marr's jangles, Joy Division is despair matched by more despair. At no point are Curtis's arhythmic confessionals backed by instrumentation any less stuck in the shit. I'm not moved to call them sincere, but they're certainly for real and yield not a shred of irony: 'I've seen the nights filled w/ bloodsport and pain / And the bodies obtained, the bodies obtained'; 'I did everything, everything I wanted to / I let them use you for their own ends.' Descriptors like heavy, gutsy, passionate, and convulsive come to mind, but they don't clarify the sustainability of the relentless darkness. Perhaps it's ineffable. Fair enuf. But perhaps it's their improbable, almost beatific creativity.

The fourth record of Stevie's 'classic period,' this alliterative thing doesn't have the immediately recognizable singles that Songs in the Key of Life, Innervisions, and Talking Book enjoy, but it's still a fantastic album. Slow and saccharine at times, it's yet always intricate, and possesses amusing lyrics such as: 'I'd like to make love to you / So you can make me scream'; 'When you sleep at night, baby / I wonder do I creep into your dreams'; 'There awaits you a ticket / At 'Please Have A Good Time' Station.' The bangers are 'Boogie On Reggae Woman' and 'You Haven't Done Nothin',' but it was the final three tracks that stood out most to me, especially 'They Won't Go When I Go,' a stunning, co-written alloy of Chopin and gospel.

'Music mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel.' The title track, the ostentatious 'Music,' incorporates the same whiny synths that Dr. Dre had been known to employ for his baptism of the g-funk era. Those synths appear on other tracks as well, giving this essentially genreless record a consistent hip-hop bite and confidence. The album cover would have you believe that there is something Western going on here, but besides the few folksy moments of acoustic guitar, make no mistake, this is a record of a city slicker, certified on the wonderfully sophisticated 'What It Feels Like for a Girl': 'But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading / 'Cause you think that being a girl is degrading.' And brava for not 'selling out,' as she closes out w/ on 'Gone.'

'Look at religion see the contradiction / The confusion, church and mosque dey cause.' W/ big shoes to fill - a Papa Kuti whose legacy is as historic as any - Femi clearly didn't crumble under the pressure. This self-titled release isn't a virtuosic affair - it isn't even as good as it gets necessarily - but what it does boast is an invitational energy and lyrics endearingly in touch w/ social, political, and spiritual realities. I'm not in love w/ each and every sound apparent on this record, especially the soft saxophonic tones that are wont to introduce many of the tracks, but when each song gets going, it's difficult to tune out. I also admire the son's intent to not forge his own path rebelliously but to carry on tradition effectively and uniquely.

'A truer lover has never yet to be found / I see the sunset thru the eyes of a clown.' Thrash + grunge + industrial, Psalm 69 boils down to rage, really in the same vein as Rage Against the Machine, tho w/ the junkie vulnerability of an Alice in Chains. It even makes its debt to good ol' Chuck Berry known on the classic 'Jesus Built My Hotrod,' the most fun you're gonna have w/ this record: 'Ding ding dong a bong bong bing bong.' B/c otherwise, you don't listen to this album for the fun of it but rather for the release and the rage of it, the scattering of all the tension you didn't know you had built up, tho it may've been killing you slowly all these years. Industrial, sure, but a million times better than Nine Inch Nails, a rare instance of metal I favor.

'Toothpaste and soap will make / Our oceans a bubble bath / So let's avoid an ecological aftermath.' The Beach Boys weren't the only artists in '71 to bemoan ecological catastrophe: Marvin Gaye in fact did it more classically on 'Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).' But no one did it as romantically or as heavenly as the grown-up and fed-up group once inclined to preach an all-is-good ethos on tracks like 'Surfin' U.S.A.' It's now Surf's Up and all is not good: 'But now my branches suffer / And my leaves don't offer / Poetry to men of song.' In good faith, I can't say this is on par w/ Pet Sounds, which in its own way is just as dark and daring as this one, but I applaud it for its originality and for its moments of unusual beauty, especially tracks 6-10.

I know full well that Fogerty and the crew weren't born on the bayou, but that doesn't get in the way of my rampant admiration for CCR, perhaps the most effective political act in the history of rock-n-roll. Their invention is always reinvention, their innovation always a throwback: they're hard-nosed hippies w/ enuf swampiness to induce some sort of peace-and-love-psychedelia. Above all, they're hit-makers, but their prophetic angles have an almost hip-hop agitation. Like Mos Def's 'New World Water': 'Take you a glass of water / Make it against the law / See how good the water tastes / When you can't have any at all.' Bayou Country isn't their best album, but it is essential, setting the stage for their next two, the greatest of their career.

Wish You Were Here is Pink Floyd's foremost artistic statement, a record that gracefully transcends the genre attached to this band. As much as I admire Animals, The Dark Side of the Moon, and even Meddle, this is the album on which they had something to say: 'You reached for the secret too soon / You cried for the moon'; 'Where have you been? / It's alright, we know where you've been.' Conceptually, 'the machine' is more interesting than any brick-by-brick-made 'wall,' and their turns into progressiveness do not smack of pretension but of necessity. The fact that it's bookended by thirteen-min tracks that feel far shorter than they are is everything: for once, the music took them over rather than the other way around.

The Experience's second release is probably their least regarded. But for this compulsive and convulsive Hendrix-listener, it's just as seminal as the other two. I love that the psychedelia is simultaneously reined-in and fully explored, w/ only 'If 6 Was 9' exceeding the five-min mark and 'Little Wing' the pithy exponent of singer-songwriter hallucinational rock. It's an album comprised of songs, not just ideas, but since it's Hendrix (+ Mitch + Noel), every strum, pluck, and hit is experimental in nature. Lyrically, it's loaded but never dense: 'I just wanna know about / the rooms behind your minds / Do I see a vacuum there / or am I going blind?' It's always uncanny hearing Jimi out, the pivotal instrumentalist in rock music, and a voice lazy as pert.

Biggie wasn't the first rapper to get personal and vulnerable on a record - he wasn't even the first to commit suicide on wax (that's Scarface) - but he was the ingenious pioneer of rap as memoir. Before Eminem was letting the world know about his mom problems and female dilemmas, B.I.G. was discharging lines like: 'Fuck the world, fuck my moms and my girl / My life is played out like a Jheri curl, I'm ready to die'; 'Born sinner, the opposite of a winner / Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner.' The debonair yet aggressive flow, the ability to voice two characters on 'Gimme the Loot' and 'Warning,' the appeal born from self-deprecation and comedic timing, all add to the mystique of an artist who has no misgivings about who he is.

'You used to have all the answers / And you, you still have them too.' I'm not sure if Romy ever heard of Mitch Hedberg, but that sure does resemble the comedian's classic joke: 'I used to do drug, I still do, but I used to too.' Unlike Mitch tho, the xx doesn't have a single funny bone in their makeup: it's all a whispered and enervating chillness that has no sense of humor or iota of what it means to be alive. It's dream pop to the extent that my bed time accords w/ the hour the record is put on, but the legacy of The Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, or even the flawed but memorable Mazzy Star is hardly continued on this record. I don't get why the Kool Aid was drunk w/ this group: nothing special and especially sleepy. Not xx: more Zzz.

A soundtrack to a crime film available at no movie theater near you, Moss Side Story is an unexpected and frustrating classic. As a concept, it's pure indulgence and posture. I'm not interested in trying to visualize the script for which this record is the sonic backdrop. But it triumphs musically, and b/c it's a collection of instrumental jazz with strings attached, it succeeds conceptually as well: scenes of lawlessness are cinematically displayed whether you like it or not. It's not the greatest crime-film soundtrack ever made - that'd be Miles Davis's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud - but it is one of the more entertaining records I've heard. Advice to the skeptic, w/ whom I can sympathize: it's not that serious. Crime films aren't high art anyway.

Duran Duran is like Saran Wrap: they cling, they're useful, they're for the purposes of storage, they're better in the unanalyzed background. Rio is a straight-up pop record, for good and for bad. While no track stands out - not even 'Hungry Like the Wolf' or 'Save a Prayer' - that also means that no track is particularly weak or abrasive. The 80s synths and backbeats have an authentic charm, Simon Le Bon is a serviceable lead, the lyrics aren't inspired but rather innocent + resourceful: 'Because you're lonely in your nightmare / Let me in / And it's barren in your garden / Let me in.' I don't like that four of the eleven songs are over five mins long, but I come away from this w/ a refreshingly clean take: superior to Squeeze, it'll do. It'll do!

To say that Björk has forged her own lane is an understatement. To start, she has more than one, as this voice-centric record parades, so different from her previous releases. She also doesn't really seem to be interested in forging anything: her singularity flows too naturally, too inevitably. This particular album tho, I have to admit, is difficult to get into. I managed to get thru the whole thing, and while there are standout moments of real beauty, I found myself thinking too much, feeling too little, ultimately falling in line with Björk's own truth: 'I want to be flexible / I want to go out / Of my way for you / But enough is enough.' I think it's the Gregorian religiosity that doesn't do it for me, not exactly sham, but not a reliable tonic either.

Distressing and dadaist, ridiculous and rudimentary, Duck Stab is authentic art rock, in the tradition of literary and cultural modernism. Absurder than Trout Mask Replica, it's yet catchier and more coherent, something like the neat and thought-out strangeness of De La Soul. The lyrics are grotesque but have me laughing in a real way: 'Your heart is like a silken sponge / That calls saliva love'; 'But he soon found out / That she had the gout / And often would wink underwater'; 'Conspicuously alcoholic, flicks his tongue at me!' It's by no means a perfect record - it's ultimately too annoying and too cockamamy for me to have a deep regard for it - but it is original, and I can appreciate it for what it is: a curt dosage of telepathic eccentricity.