Reviews by verlainemorrison96

'Why are you so petrified of silence? / Here, can you handle this?' Angsty, shallow, eccentric, bold, Jagged Little Pill is an undeniable success and an enduring statement, an uneven and imperfect record, but ultimately soulful and compelling. Morissette's voice is shrill, indeed jagged, even when she slows down on tracks like 'Perfect' and 'You Learn,' intent on shouting and quavering her way to some sort of pieced-together discordance: 'I'm sad but I'm laughing / I'm brave but I'm chickenshit'; 'A traffic jam when you're already late / A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break.' Not much ironic here, but it flourishes in a way sincere pop frequently missteps. And who would've thought that the next great harmonica-ad-libber would be Alanis?

'And it don't bleed / And it don't breathe / It's locked its jaws / And now it's swallowing.' Grungy tho not exactly grunge, Gentlemen is a visceral and sensible breakup record: 'Ladies, let me tell you about myself / I got a dick for a brain / And my brain is gonna sell my ass to you.' The concept album, w/ an uncomplicated notion at its core, does a lot in the way of supporting the cause for good songwriting, b/c that's ultimately what steals the show. It's not Greg Dulli's voice - not dull but not particularly notable either - or the intensity of the instrumentation. It's not even the lyrics necessarily, tho there are moments that have their shine. It's the structure and the flow, it's the abstract gestalt that somehow delivers something concrete in the end.

'Haunted and tortured by / The rumors about you / Listening in silence / To whispers of truth.' Some cheatin' chick has wound up on his bad side, but instead of merely allowing his jealousy get to him, tho he doesn't exactly monitor his outrage, Yoakam decides to sob some pretty effective poetry: 'I searched til' I found them, / then I cursed at the sight / Of their sleeping shadows / In the cold neon light.' But what makes this such a successful record is that, released in '88 and heard for the first time 2025, it doesn't collapse into a pointless throwback. Instead, the Bakersfield sound, inured by Buck Owens himself, is shown to have more stamina and relevance than I would've guessed. Even the Jesus-dyed conclusion has me cooperating.

The Boo Radleys got their name from Harper Lee's classic novel and this record's title from John Coltrane's essential 1960 album, odd works of art to proclaim for a pop act such as this. But beyond the cryptic allusions lies a solid enough release, a collection of tracks that teeters between The La's and My Bloody Valentine, The Stone Roses and The Pixies, sweet acoustics and distorted violence. Lyrically too, it swings from the transparent to the obscure: 'Wishin' I had money / Wishin' for the time to spend it all'; 'I've got nothing against not being proud / to me it's alright.' At sixty-four mins tho, the fusion of pop and experiment sprawls lamely, leaving you w/ four or five tracks that boast a legitimate raison d'être, heralded by 'Lazarus.'

Achtung Baby starts off fresh enough, w/ an uncharacteristic edgy Edge riff and an assertive drum break, tho it still possesses Bono's distinctive mush: 'I'm ready to say / I'm glad to be alive / I'm ready / I'm ready for the push.' Lyricism is not only not U2's forte, it's a distraction and a diminishment, particularly when Bono sloppily evokes literary tropes: 'We're free to fly the crimson sky / The sun won't melt our wings tonight.' Contrast that w/ Joni's allusiveness and you'll see who has the edge: 'Like Icarus ascending / On beautiful foolish arms / Amelia it was just a false alarm.' Like most U2 records, it fails to be what it's meant to be: it's not pop since it's too self-serious, but it's not rock either since it extends no real punch to the gut.

Ethereal yet annealed by the accessible, spiritual yet wholly tempered by the objective and earthbound, Djam Leelii is almost frightfully gorgeous. It takes a special kind of artist to have a grip on 'peace,' especially when it's the primary affect the music offers, but for Baaba Maal and Mansour Seck, peace isn't sand that filters thru your fingers but something far sturdier, a hoisted dream bestowed on horizontal rather than vertical airwaves: this isn't music that comes from on high, but paradisal it still is. One is struck more by the vocals and guitar playing than anything percussive, but each track is as rhythmic as it is melodic. At seventy-two minutes, it's long, but only for those who undervalue bliss is it too long. An astonishing record.

Chilled out but never filled out, Smokers Delight hardly approaches its shroomy album art, which has the fecund aspect of psychedelia gone right. Instead, this is the blunt hit that propels you from a steady high to a looped nightmare, the groove that stops grooving and's got you panicking b/c you want some color and fullness back in your life. It's not that I can't get down w/ music that's better in the background, it's that this is more like tasteless food for thought: I prefer my highs to unstick my brain rather than imprison it in savorless inertia. Some of the tracks succeed on their own, like 'Wait a Minute / Praying For A Jeepbeat,' 'Groove St.,' and 'Bless My Soul,' but this is a failure of a complete record, a thin clutter of boomeranging lethargy.

Otis Redding's voice goes in and out like a radio broadcast, but somehow never loses its power, its consequence, its relatability. For a little more than thirty minutes, the great soul innovator has the right-of-way, taking you to every locale the genre can go. But what makes this particular record so intensely vital is that four of the eleven covers have come to be associated w/ other artists, and yet not for one second are you doubtful of Redding's ability to transcend the canonization of those tracks. 'Respect' is Aretha's, 'A Change Is Gonna Come' is Sam Cooke's, 'My Girl' is The Temptations's, and 'Satisfaction' is The Stones's, but Otis's versions aren't just up to par, they're standards of their own, epitomizing that tragically truncated career.

Having moved on from the Dust Bros, the Chemical Bros are still trusters of dust, as they clarify on the second track of this record. In reality, however, they're closer to something alchemical: their genius is sample-based and organized around making the big breakbeat even bigger than it is. Before Fatboy, Daft Punk, etc., the duo from Manchester, much like Philip Glass in the realm of European forms, alchemized the repetitive into something less redundant than a whole lot of apparently variegated popular music. +, as the cover-art couple distills - a couple that brings to mind Dylan and Suze Rotolo on Freewheelin' - there's something so 90s-optimistic about this LP that it's as if The Stone Roses' up-for-whatever slant is tautened + purified.

The Ramones were already effectively anti-hippie, not to mention The VU, who established the thing a decade earlier, but the Sex Pistols are another thing entirely: 'She was a no-one who killed her baby / She sent her letters from the country / She was an animal / She was a bloody disgrace.' Always partial to the Ramones for their New York wit and evocation of 50s rock-n-roll, all the same, I can appreciate the power of this record, manufactured as it is. The guitars and drums hit hard, they stay in the pocket and have a groove of their own punkish kind, and Rotten's voice is a remarkable sneer, an angry face fomented by the vocals alone. It boils down to a statement rather than a durable take on rock music, but what a statement it (still) is.

'Hello, I'm Terry, and I'm / Going to enjoy myself first'; 'Hey little rich girl / where did you go wrong?'; 'New pair of shoes are on my feet / Cos' fashion is my only culture.' More Specials is an improvement on the first record in terms of production quality and songwriting variety, but wanting is the raft of rawness Elvis Costello secured for their debut. The band plays around w/ ska, obviously, but also American soul and funk on 'Sock It to 'Em J.B.' (James Brown, no?), the basis of the northern soul sound. I welcome the inclusion of assorted genres, and tho the record wilts a bit on 'Pearl's Cafe' and the seven-minute 'Stereotype / Stereotype, Pt. 2,' More Specials is mostly more of the same, not unrefined, but still rejuvenating, special even.

'Well, I'll be riding on the bus 'til I Cadillac.' These tres hombres from Tejas greatly shorten the formulas given to them by the Allman Bros, but they're cut from the same cloth. Like Duane, Billy Gibbons plays an effortless lead slide, and like their Jacksonville brethren, ZZ configure honky-tonk lore into appropriate blues and boogie programs. But unlike the Bros, whom I adore, the three guys appreciate economy and demand of their listeners a sense of humor: 'A-haw, haw, haw, haw / A-haw, haw, haw, haw.' They also wear their influences on their sleeve, sounding like the Stones on 'Move Me on Down the Line' and The Meters on the unexpectedly funky 'Sheik.' I'm not moved to play this any chance I get, but its pleasures are hardy and real.

A live album that's as dead as the medievalisms these dudes resurrect, w/ an ear for the pretentious and the sentimental: 'Eroded by times rivers / To the shapes we now possess'; 'Trained apart from houses of stone / Hour of horses pick the bone'; 'Come forth, from love's spire / Born in life's fire.' It's soap-operatic rather than rock-operatic, brimming w/ melodrama and about a thousand meaningless interludes. ELP is missing the H, tho I doubt they found any, releasing seven tapes after this one, and something tells me they're no better than this organ-blasted nonsense. I actually feel for Baba Yaga, stuck in this soulless mess w/o even an attempt to understand where he's coming from or to properly delineate his character. The nerve!

'I stand in front of you / I'll take the force of the blow, protection.' So sings Tracey Thorn (Everything but the Girl) on the first track, and she seems to mean it. In fact, 'protective' is how to describe this album in general, since it's mostly on the defensive and erects a veneer difficult to penetrate: you are invited to flow along, but at a distance is the only level of intimacy it offers. That has its upsides, especially for those of us who want others to 'take the force of the blow,' at least some of the time. But as a sustainable source of felicity or welfare, it's not the gestalt I'm looking for. Better than Portishead b/c the escapism is varied and allusive rather than acquiescent and morose, Massive Attack are a crucial 90s outfit, but thin in ways too.

Hyperbole rather than transgression is the name of the game on Dr. Dre's The Chronic, a record that's as dated as it is timeless. Nope, it's not the misogyny that's dated, it's D.R.E.'s beef w/ Eazy-E, easily the least creative, the least interesting, and the most regrettable in hip-hop history: 'PS fuck Mr. Roarke and Tattoo / A.K.A. Jerry and Eazy'; 'Or thought I was sleazy / Or thought I was a mark / 'cause I used to hang w/ Eazy.' Lyrically, altho it features legendary verses from Snoop, RBX, and Dre himself, most of it is typical gangsterism. But the beats literally never miss. Inaugurating G-funk, Dre also establishes the logic of layering in hip-hop production. In many ways, it's the first rap record, and maybe the last, to be 'engineered.'

A legitimate fusion of jazz, blues, soul, and folk, Happy Sad is a machine of incorporation and expression: never bogged down by its inventiveness, it yet never ceases to impress or to discover. Buckley's voice is a delicious amalgam of singers like Fred Neil, Richie Havens, and Nina Simone, and he anticipates later figures such as Patti Smith and, that's right, Jeff Buckley. Tracks 3-5 tend to drag a bit, altho I love the finality of 'Gypsy Woman,' but he sings so gorgeously on 'Strange Feelin',' 'Buzzin' Fly,' and 'Sing a Song for You,' and so brilliantly melds elements of the folk scene as well as the jazz of Charles Mingus, The Modern Jazz Quartet, and others, that the moments of indulgence and preciousness don't smack of an ersatz quality.

A 'counterattack on world supremacy' that's more world supremacy, i.e., a 'black planet,' will never work out, but Fear of a Black Planet has more than a rumble of truth in it. Conspiratorial, not so much, Public Enemy is merely tired of the shitty system and more often than not espouse common sense: 'Teach a man how to be a father / To never tell a woman he can't bother'; 'Every brother ain't a brother / Cause a black hand / Squeezed on Malcolm X the man'; 'Yeah, I'll check out a movie / But it'll take a black one to move me.' Before PC there was PE, which recognizes identity but isn't swallowed up by identity politics. But The Bomb Squad's atonal funk, that noisy yet charitable in-your-facism, remains the sui generis export of the group.

Fishbone gets going w/ a hard-rocked Curtis Mayfield. After that, the band seems to makes it way thru every damn genre known to man, but w/ an ear for what makes you get up and dance: the only common theme that holds this record together is a belief that stimulation has far more truth and soul than any downer could possess. They're also lyrical when they want to be, w/ funky queries and the like: 'Hey, Ma and Pa / What the hell is wrong w/ ya'll'; 'You choose to close your eyes / And the rest of the world will bleed'; 'We are waitin' in restaurants over there / We are waitin' in cars somewhere over there.' Most revelatory, they do what the Chili Peppers never could - they goof off effectively, coherently, funkily, politically.

The Police aren't just white reggae, they're reggae lite, they've nothing to do w/ Haile Selassie or the political machine crushing Kingstown natives. They're rhythm moochers and profoundly shallow, but they're a group that makes so much out of so little that I can't help but dig their one-off brand of pop music. Sting's voice is a permanent mainstay in the listener's brain after hearing him but once, as are the buoyant guitar riffs and the indelible wielding of the hi-hat, perhaps the crucial item for the band's signature sound. 'Some say / Tomorrow's another day / You stay / I may as well play.' That's a laudable axiom, and a helpful one for appreciating this more-than-popular group, impossible to forget tho you may forget to throw them on.

Tho not exactly overshadowed by Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan does seem to be remembered as the third of that legendary trio of jazz vocalists, perhaps the three greatest of the twentieth century. On this live recording, she musters up so much clarity, so much simplicity, so much swing, so many daring flashes of on-key-then-off-key hilarities, that you'd be hard-pressed not to fall in love on impact. Her characteristic vibrato is actually more controlled in this live context than it often is in the studio, but she's as playful as ever, as jocoserious as Ella is in Berlin, w/ understatements and nonchalances keeping her afloat. She's far more full-bodied than she is merely impressive: a pivotal and enduring vocalist.