Reviews by verlainemorrison96

'However, I master the trick just like Nixon.' I firmly believe that Illmatic is the perfection of the hip-hop idiom. W/ this said, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is the greatest hip-hop record of all time b/c it's somehow so hip-hop that it's virtually something else entirely. In other words, the clan penetrates so deep into the mythos of rap music that it comes out on the other side, & things look hazy, bizarre, dirty, & delectably hardcore. I love, LOVE, the rapping on this thing - every member, including U-God, delivers a classic verse - but what takes it to the next level, a level that hasn't been reached since, is RZA's impossibly virtuosic production, an amalgam of the oldest school of hip-hop wisdom & futuristic flavors that defy all definition.

Epic & understated at the same time, Oxygène is both an aimless, spiritless mess & a dosage of shiftless, unengaged monotony. I mean I get it - Jarre was going for Mike Oldfield & he succeeded in producing a French-electro version of Tubular Bells, w/ laser-beam shots & sounds to boot. To be fair, this record is slightly better than Oldfield's, if only for the brief moments of tranquil contemplation that it provides, but this is really slight - like a 1 to 2 upgrade kind of slight. I think I hate most its pretentious intention to spook - that Jarre must've had self-deceptions of being some cinematic artiste as well as a master of musical innovation. Neither, in my opinion. Not only of its time, but worse, a stilted & unlovable period piece, Oxygène is bad art.

'The multinational corporation / Takes its profits from the starving nations.' It takes itself, & its experiment, too seriously, but not in the way metal is so often an insufferably boring art form. No, Scum is the natural culmination of punk losing its ironic edge, a loss the hardcore ethos incarnates. I like a whole lotta hardcore, but it isn't lost on me that e'en the Minutemen no longer enjoy the joyful & playful ironies of the Ramones. 'Hide behind TV / Hide behind life / You should be living / But you only survive.' So, Napalm Death are hardcore to the nth degree of sincerity, which is why they don't suffer from the grandiosity of metal but still fall victim to self-importance. I like it sonically - it's a mess, & I'm often messy - but solemnity has a price.

Functional but not particularly interesting or impressive, 90 at its best is in its hip-hop & house groove, & at its worst w/ a futuristic edge that doesn’t exactly inspire faith in the future. It’s the ultimate take-it-or-leave-it album, possessing moments of almost bliss but ne'er heeding the fact that it could simply be better. I guess I'm not crazy 'bout reserved electro-beat music, i.e., if you're gonna go electro you oughta go for cheap & dumb, hence my appreciation of The Prodigy & The Chemical Brothers. 90 isn't what you'd call quiet exactly, but it flirts too much w/ art for my liking - if I wanted that, I'd listen to Moby or DJ Shadow. Otherwise, I comprehend the influence of this thing, but not its gravity or its sheer somatic pleasures: decent, okay.

'& while Lenin read a book on Marx / A quartet practiced in the park / & we sang dirges in the dark.' Short, brilliant albums are gifts from the heavens above; short, mediocre records could be e'en shorter, but we're grateful for the small things of life - & at least we don't have to bear that mediocrity for long. McLean's American Pie (the album) falls into this second category: over in a flash, it yet could've been over in a flashier flash, but 36 mins ain't long. I've never listened to 'American Pie' (the song) intentionally, & I won't again. As for the rest, Don's sincerity is so sincere it's somehow not, & his voice is simply too thin to care. If I wanted corny Americana, I'd take John Denver above all else. This Chevy Chase lookin' cornball's a ditzy sedative.

Well-produced, Selling England By The Pound at times sounds good, but ya know what doesn't sound good? Having to listen to Peter Gabriel sing his laddish little British heart out - that doesn't sound good at all. It really is beyond the pretentiousness of the prog project. I adore plenty of acts & writers who not only push the conceptual boundaries, but who can be said to intellectualize in order to impress. But they ultimately have soul & they know that's most precious. No, I think there must be a spiritual difference between me & the proggers, e'en more than the metalheads. 'Me, I'm just a lawnmower / You can tell by the way I walk.' Conceptual? Give me Kinks or Kendrick. Long? How 'bout Mama Too Tight. Smart? Loads, & not this.

& thus punk was born. Or so the story goes, & it's a real & true story, but I guess I get a bit tired of chasing the origins of genres. I mean, you could call Charles Mingus punk, if you really wanted to, or how 'bout Christopher Marlowe while we're at it? In other words, beginnings of punk be damned, I just think this record is fucking great: maniacal, tho sensible, political, & a word I often dread, but here it's simply apt: heavy. I'm sure 'live' is how we were to supposed to hear these boys, so much so that I almost don't think of this as a live album. Music like this requires the messiness of the raw & unadorned setting of a live & living set. It's pretty remarkable that the MC5 came together in '63. Then again, the world's been fucked up, so why not?

When I was first getting into this sort of music, & having fallen in love w/ one of the greatest (art)-punk acts of all time, which would be Television, I had a moment where I thought Magazine were on those heights as well. & it'd be a lovely thing to have Television & Magazine be your two fav groups - who'd be the others? TV On The Radio? Radiohead? Anyway, Magazine are certainly no Television, & Real Life is no Marquee Moon. It still is a very good record, & a memorable one, but it sorta, kinda boils down to different versions of that great hit, 'Shot By Both Sides.' It doesn't strike me as the artsy-fartsy thing that prob rubbed people the wrong way when it had been released in '78. It's just the songs are long, & the lyrics abstract/paranoid.

Not e'en the best from his Asylum years - that would be Small Change, by a long shot - Heartattack And Vine still holds more than sentimental value for me, i.e., it contains some very good songs (title track, 'Jersey Girl,' 'On The Nickel,' 'Ruby's Arms') & represents a necessary & vibrant transition in the man's career. Lyrics like 'Don't you know there ain't no Devil / There's just God when he's drunk' suggest what Waits would be all about once he left Asylum & went on to produce his most creative, challenging, artistically daring works. But yeah, a great deal here simply reminds me of an easier, innocenter time, when Waits would be my morning, midday, & after hours. My personal fav is 'On The Nickel,' tho I prefer the live version on Don Lane.

Blue Lines clearly has what it takes to be simultaneously the most essential trip-hop record to date, b/c the first, & the best trip-hop album, b/c sorta the last. 'I was looking back to see / If you were looking back at me / To see me looking back at you.' That's very much like Walt Whitman at the end of 'Song of Myself' warning, 'I stop somewhere waiting for you.' I think we're still catching up w/ this release, 35 years later. Looking back at us, it's the miraculous amalgamation of Tribe/Digable Planets & Marvin Gaye's soulful late-night tributes, especially that still undervalued I Want You. Luxuriating yet matter-of-fact, Massive Attack are almost so fake they gotta be real. I actually don't think they're fake or false at all - but they are gloriously jive.

The rockiest rock album you'll probably e'er hear, & unfortunately that's a bad thing. Sounding like a bored & perfunctory Allman Brothers, Bad Co.'s a supergroup featuring no superstars, which ain't so super to me. But the unknowns of the rock world - well, unknown to moi - deserve to be heard, no doubt. It just so happens that I couldn't care less what Rodgers, Ralphs, Burrell, & Kirke have got to say. 'Finding out along the way / What it takes to keep love living / You should know how it feels, my friend.' Save 'The Way I Choose,' a decent, heartfelt ballad, their debut is actually worse than what I've heard from Deep Purple. Maybe it's Burrell's prog sentiments, or perhaps it’s their shitty Southern USA imitations. Prob both - I can do w/o.

I'm pretty sure I don't love Björk, but I'm also pretty sure I love this record, celebrated by many as her best, & I'm pretty sure I agree. Symbolism & a great deal of pagan esotericism rule the day here, qualities I usually don't go for in music, but the Icelander has the genius of a basic & all-too-human pop-star as well, & her oddball tendencies simply don't rub me the wrong way. Simultaneously offering a lot & a little to chew over, Vespertine, at the end of the day, is an intellectual effort that gets run over by an abundance of beauty. 'A mountain shade suggests your shape / I tumbled down on my knees.' A spiritual & somatic takeover, the album is like an anxiety dream that's also a pillow & an easy daydream, so spooky & yet so commodious.

Behaviour is not quite the nightmare before the very gorgeous, & very, very sexually overcoming record that arrived after this one, really now one of my favorites, that Calamus-explosion called Very, but this is certainly darker & bitterer. I love Very for its bravery & its melodies, its sincerity & its ability to turn fantasy into clear-as-day reality - you're simply not stumbling on lines such as the following: 'Living a law just short of delusion / When we fall in love, there's confusion.' It's all good tho - I know there's no ravishing light w/o a ravaging dark - & for what it's worth, Behaviour's still very good, just not Very otherworldly. The Pet Shop Boys are masters of baroque pop w/ a electro-twist, & their songwriting chops are second to none. A great band.

'Straight to my head / Like the first cigarette of the day.' Ravishing, yes, & more impressive than plenty of Radiohead yawners (The Bends, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief), Elbow's The Seldom Seen Kid still suffers from what you could call 'the issue of not having an issue.' I don't believe all meaningful art is necessarily born out of conflict, tho a lot is, but all great art is for real & has a basis in something heavy & difficult. 'There's a Chinese cigarette case / & the rest you can keep.' Things get somewhat heavy & difficult on 'Grounds for Divorce,' a White-Stripes-inspired anthem, but that's really a kind of window-dressing blues. I find myself appreciating the production, & the fact that this is so much better than Doves or Muse. Otherwise, meh.

It’s the drumming, an obvious sort of statement, & hardly what you could call a significant observation, but yeah, it’s the drumming that clarifies this record into essential listening. I don’t know too much about the history of albums that feature mostly percussion, but this has got to be up there w/ Drums of Passion, et al. A banging NYC experience as well, the 8 tracks that make up this thing are refrains & choruses - mantras really - that are also & always real songs, not just real flavors. Of course, the entire octet must be recognized, & there's a great deal of proficient guitar & bass here, but conguero Sabú Martínez is both the master of ceremony & the genius behind. In short, I'm falling in love w/ drums all over again. A killer record.

Sans 'The Weight,' The Band's self-titled second still leaps & perfects the power of Music from Big Pink, a very good record but not this sort of thing. Their closest rivals would be Creedence, but The Band is more in touch w/ the spirituality & religiosity of this country. Politics are not front & center, e'en on a track like 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down': 'I swear by the mud below my feet / You can't raise a Kane back up / When he's in defeat.' In other words, steeped in the Bible like Emerson/Melville, these Canadiens + Levon Helm (Elaine, Arkansas) don't write pious or believing music, they sing rhetorically powerful & religious music, secular hymns vibrating w/ all the sharking urgency of The Great Awakenings. I shake too, unbelievingly.

'I knocked 'em dead in Dallas / & I didn't pay my dues / Yeah, I knocked 'em dead in Dallas / They didn't know we were Jews.' The New York Dolls had already gone there two years prior, but '75 is still ancestor-time for punk in NYC, & shoutouts must be sent the way of The Dictators, whose debut Go Girl Crazy, tho no masterpiece, does the heavy lifting that would allow for a don't-give-a-fuck genre to flourish. The Dolls were better b/c they wrote better songs - it's really as simple as that - & b/c Andy Shernoff is no David Johansen qua vocalist/frontman. 'I don't want music, I want pain.' Still, the music lives & is alive, fresh, hard, uncomfortable: 'I Got You Babe' (one of the better covers I've heard), 'Teengenerate,' 'Two Tub Man,' all excellent.

A bit too Gary Numanish for moi - Gary's just not my cuppa - but Quiet Life is still a competent new-wave, synth-pop record. The production begets a very full, very neat sound across the board, & yet what strikes me most of all are the lyrics, abstract yet balanced by something you could call intense & compelling: 'Thru the shrieking wails / Trans European overseas / Silently leaving Amsterdam / We looked a lot like you.' W/ this said, I simply don't get much pleasure out of it, which goes back to the Numan thing. It isn't cold or uninspired, & David Sylvian is neither a hack nor a ham. Simply put, there isn't a track I'm absolutely yearning to hear again, half having to do w/ the fact that they're too long & pretentious, half that they don't cohere.

'I feel bad, so bad / Tho I ain't done nothing wrong, I feel bad.' A gorgeous comeback in every sense of the word, Broken English is damn near perfect, tho I'm not sure there's a single perfect track ('The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan' comes closest). In short, strong & believable, the album is essentially the darkest, heaviest, grittiest easy-listening experience you'll ever undergo, & that's why it's simultaneously so odd & yet so sensible. Hardly e'er altering her tune & tone, Faithfull is all 'bout that no-nonsense realism - 'Why'd Ya Do It' is harder than just 'bout anything Patti Smith e'er released (not better - just stating a fact) - but Marianne's a visionary at heart. She's just gone thru the fire & knows there's no coming back from that. Just a comeback.

The fact that the first track on this so-called metal album is called 'Women' & the last is 'Love And Affection' endears me to it a bit, & Rick Allen's one-armness is a legend of a kind, but too much 'One part love, one part wild / One part lady, one part child,' like all things shit, somehow confounds & wearies at the same time: confusingly cliché. 3 years of something went into the making of this record, tho I wouldn't be so generous as to call it 3 years of craft, since it's clear from the outset that this thing is a monster of manufacturing. 'Animal' has its moments of that Max-Weinbergian flair for the precise & energetic - there just aren't enuf of 'em. I'll give it up to 'em - they're hopeless romantics, which I like & I respect - but the music? Shite.