Reviews by verlainemorrison96

E'en w/o that open of a mind, I not only appreciate (old) country & western music, I love & admire it: Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard, Tom T. Hall, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, these figures & others have become a deep part of my being. I'll add these high-registered locos to that list, tho The Louvin Brothers & their Baptist-drenched rhetoric isn't so easy to take, & that's coming from an atheist who loves Mahalia, gospel Aretha, gospel Elvis, etc. Yet for the most part, this record is just one more in the pantheon of deeply pleasurable & meaningful country music, w/ Ira's mandolin being a particular delight. & I love just how foretelling the whole thing is: in their conservatisms, you yet hear the rumblings of alt country.

Industrial pop &/or sit down & count the ways monotony & pressure may go hand in hand, L'Eau Rouge is like the weirdest arena act you'll e'er hear. This is music for the pretentious sports fan. I don't enjoy it, I don't actually respect it, but I guess I understand it - it's there to get you hyped & freaky all at the same time. It's just that Franz Treichler's vocals are a headache & a guttural forgery that remind me of a Tom Waits who forgot to take a dose of the good lord - at least something that'll redeem the edginess that in the end is no more than Kiss on a French acid trip (listen to the transition from 'Charlotte' to 'Longue route'). Performers that underperform, these so-called young gods are neither gods nor that young. Pub rock for weirdos.

What is this shit? That question only implies dismissal when the shit you're asking what the shit is is shit rather than 'shit' being a generic term like, 'oh yeah, I dig this shit.' 2 tracks in, which covers a good 15 to 16 mins, I was pretty sure Welcome To The Pleasuredome was shit. 'Shooting stars never stop / Shooting stars never stop.' 'Relax (Come Fighting)' is not e'en what you could call a respectable 80s hit, tho I guess if it came on in a club or a film score, I could get down. Otherwise, 4 tracks in, & I knew this was shit. A prog & arena mismatch, this is truly a dismal, dreadful, dated, dumb, &, I don't know, decaying record: I'd show this to those wanting to get a sense of the bad side of culture. The problem is it can't e'en do the bad side well.

I'm not sure what my favorite Monk record or recording is, there being too many to account for, but this classic is up there. In literature, we're taught to consider the tragic, the comic, & the tragicomic, whereas in music we're told of the major & minor moods. Whether Monk is major or minor, I really don't have the chops to know, but what I can tell is that he is one of the few artists, maybe the only one, that combines the comic w/ the beautiful. His compositions & soloing are somehow hauntingly funny as well as riotously gorgeous: you don't know whether to laugh or cry, but the crying part isn't to do w/ tragedy. It's everything to do w/ his still inexplicable beauty. & on this one, you get a particularly Monkish Sonny Rollins, an utterly sweet gift.

Neither that strange nor that unaccountable, Music From the Penguin Cafe is a fresh sort of record: pop avant-gardism at its finest. In his far weirder collection of stories The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles, Herman Melville has this to say about the penguin: 'Though dabbling in all three elements, and indeed possessing some rudimental claims to all, the penguin is at home in none. On land it stumps; afloat it sculls; in the air it flops.' These penguins, however, are at home in at least three elements: Philip Glassian repetition, Enoish experimentalism, & British folk à la Fairport Convention. A little cold & intellectual at times, yes, but this is also proof that you could incorporate classical music into pop & rock w/o being a prog snob, i.e., ELP.

'You come awake / In a horny morning mood / & have a proper wriggle / In the naughty naked nude.' In a sense, Randy Newman is already the Randy Newman of punk rock, but if you want to get actual & specific, Ian Dury is. A master of sardonic music hall humor - 'I'm partial to your abracadabra' - Dury writes songs of wit & heart, digging deep into narratives of the British working class. Here he's singing 'bout his old man: 'He was tidy in his digs / Had to have an operation / When his ulcer got too big / When his ulcer got too big.' There's plenty of grit, reality, & inventive playing ('Clevor Trever'), a saving grace given the abundance of word play, which w/o some good & solid tunes can get tiresome. In short, it can & does go hard, w/ solos & all.

For the duration of 'bout five record releases, from Blue thru Hejira, Joni M could essentially do no wrong, tho this particular album certainly wasn't a critical smash. 'Rousseau walks on trumpet paths / Safaris to all that jazz.' Not just experimental, but weird, weird, & really fucking weird, The Hissing of Summer Lawns features a Mitchell that had mastered her characteristic cadences: she's fully in control, she knows who she is, why she is, & what she's doing. 'God goes up the chimney / Like childhood Santa Claus / The good slaves love the good book / A rebel loves a cause.' W/ this said, & the same can be said about Court and Spark, Hissing highlights a reachin' Joni. Reachin' for what, you may ask? For Hejira, her zenith & her raison d'être.

It sounds like a soundtrack b/c it is one. Setting & stealing scenes of 70s Bollywood, the record, tho not quite at the level of Super Fly or Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, is a pretty, pretty delicious score. An Indo-American film, Shalimar (the music) sounds like that, touching on jazz, funk, doo-wop, & other American offerings, tho the Indian elements are also present. The English title of the film is Raiders of the Sacred Stone, & yet I don't really picture scenes of exotic adventures, snake charmers, or belly dancers: a simpler story is relayed to me. However the film actually plays out, I count it a rousing success that the soundtrack makes me want to see the film, ya know, like a live record that makes you want to see that band or artist live.

Obviously difficult for me to judge on purely technical grounds, & I hesitate to admire Call of the Valley from the point of view that it happened to have a major influence on a bunch of white musicians (Dylan, Crosby, Harrison, McCartney). I can only go for aesthetic & somatic reasons, which I guess we should be going for anyway. Something along the lines of 'peaceful' & 'meditative' are the most evident descriptors, but one ought to add to that 'dangerous,' 'preparatory,' & 'slice of life.' Energized by the tranquility of a natural setting, the album is likewise a human story, & in this story I trace the outlines of a birth, a battle, & many bits of everydayness. Of course, it is no more than a feeling (or a strong suggestion) of coherent storytelling.

'In the light of the fact on the lone & level / Sands stretch far away.' That's a nod to Shelley's 'Ozymandias,' a poem that famously takes to task man's penchant for unfounded power/dominion. But this is an album that suffers from its lack of power, being too dramatic to be impressive & too tongue-in-cheek to be believable, tho I do allow that it has a kind of fullness. 'As the water come rushing in / As the water come rushing in.' Associative but not effectively abstract, Andrew Eldritch sings from the vantage point of a goth w/ little imagination, meaning not very goth, at least as Walpole would have it. But I would be remiss if I said I didn't sorta enjoy the whole thing, e'en if it's mostly a matter of it's being a proper ode to the drab, 80s style.

Muffled vocals, clear vocals, feel-good critiques of America, down-in-the-dumps negativisms, all this & the best psychedelic funk e'er produced add up to one of our great records that combine indulgent aesthetics w/ the v hard art of statement-making. 'I'm a songwriter, yeah, a poet.' Said just 2 years before the official birth of hip-hop, this presages that consciousness, & I so admire its forward-thinkingness, but Sly at his best (Stand, There's A Riot, Greatest Hits) is (for real) inimitable. That not-to-be-replicated style culminates on 'Family Affair,' a track that may just be THE song of the 70s, but the whole record is a crystalized vision. You marvel at the audacity as much as you're in disbelief in re the formality. Quintessential; unrivaled; ✌🏾.

As the album cover tells, this album is not only guitar-based (which band of the twentieth-century isn't?) but actually ABOUT the guitar - an ode to the most revolutionary instrument of modernity. 'Where you going now, don't turn around.' & yeah, Kevin Shields does impossible things, leaving you w/ a fuzzy brain full of beautiful sounds, always asking, 'how do they do that,' tho never really wanting to know. It's also one of the greatest displays of sampling in the nineties annals. But it's likewise (don't take this the wrong way) music that could be delightfully played in a Walmart, & I don't think a single person would turn their head in consternation: think Blonde/Channel Orange. 'Turn my head into sound / I don't know when I lay on the ground.'

If Earth, Wind & Fire took some acid but somehow became more boring - & more British - this is what you'd get. Not e'en remotely in the same breath as Stevie Wonder, tho Jay Kay goes for that sort of chorus on 'Too Young to Die,' Jamiroquai aren't disgraceful funksters (they mean well, have good intentions, etc.) - they're actually just too (fill in the blank) to get down. I'm trying to avoid the unproductive phrase 'too white,' but the crew leaves me w/ little alternative. I'll try to elaborate. A moving, not just a grooving, kind of music, funk should have what you may term 'emotional depth.' That's a pretty ghastly expression, but when art doesn't have it, you miss what you would otherwise consider cliché. This doesn't have it. & it's shit. Q.E.D.

Another impossible, radical release from PE #1, Apocalypse 91...The Enemy Strikes Black will probably never have the same cultural significance as It Takes a Million or Fear of a Black Planet, but it's absolutely on their level & may just be more perfected than those two prior classics. Chuck D never had any want of confidence, but this sounds like a group that knew exactly what they could do & did it grandly, savvily, elegantly. That's right, this is a gracious ride, & The Bomb Squad, being so good at what they produce, are masters of noise, craft, & majesty. +, Chuck learns to lighten up just a bit, a welcome maturation: 'The ass is connected to the brain stem / Ah so I sing a simple song, so you can see the sucker in 'em.' In short, that's 4/4 in '91.

Horny is Marvin Gaye, Prince, TLC, D'Angelo - this is just a good, good time & a musically adventurous breath of funk + soul + blues. Tho I concede it's a (racial) mess lyrically, I'm reminded that The Stones, etc. have their bad, not so great moments as well, not an excuse, but a contextualizing take. I don't know, these songs are just real fucking good, & Tim Buckley's voice is a brilliant fusion of Fred Neil, Jim Morrison, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, & a whole lot of others I can't quite put a name to. A groove & bash - smooth but oh so slamming - Greetings From L.A. is kinda unlike anything else I've ever heard, & I really mean that. Instrumentally too, this has got all you'd ever want if you're looking for a sustainable source of sex, taste, & heart.

'One day I'm feeling total / The next day I'm split in two.' It's not just that it came out in '78, & the group formed in '76, a prescience that competes w/ The Velvet Underground's formation in '64 & debut release in '67, tho that is a big part of it. It's that The Scream is perhaps the first album to record a poetry of punkish energy as well as punk of poetic touch: 'Be a carcass / Be a dead pork / Be limblessly in love / Be limblessly in love.' This is dark & abstract music. In fact, it's dark b/c it's so abstract & yet so visceral. You know there's more than pain behind the record, but bad dreams, bad trips, psychological spirals, & all the ingredients of impressionistic thinking. I do have some trouble w/ the production quality, but mostly, a quaking release.

I don't know what this record is about or what it's aiming for - I guess there is something 'beyond the skin' but its skin-deepness is also apparent, i.e., it seems to possess a beauty for beauty's sake ethos, & I'm struck by the superficiality of the project. It does, in fact, command some sort of beauty, & I admire its admixture of both genre & language (shoutout to Spek from Canada's Dream Warriors), but the simultaneity of all-over-the placeness w/ languid, incoherent politics makes for a boring & confusing listen. 'Life is like a puzzle not pieced yet.' I wish Sawhney spent more time piecing it together, but Beyond Skin, in the end, gives you weak Bill Evans + pleas for a better, nuclear-free world. I agree (obv), but something cultish 'bout this.

(White) Southern progressives, as Lynyrd Skynyrd had been in their earlier renditions, Drive-By Truckers are by nature a band I'm liable to recommend w/o hearing one track of theirs. But this goes beyond ideology & is really a matter of Hood/Cooley being the necessary, impossible fusion of Ronnie Van Zandt & Neil Young, w/ a little added Lucinda Williams there for style & lyricism, & the fact that Southern Rock Opera is somehow long - real long - & conceptual but isn't overly experimental or indulgent. Nah, this is just an hour & a half of a lot of good songs. & yeah, the politics are mostly good & clean, if at times overly simple. 'Ain't about the races, the crying shame / To the fuckin' rich man / All poor people are the same.' & you learn to boot.

'Drivel head knows all the stars / Loves to suck their shining guitars.’ Pluck & aplomb, for no reason but every reason, make this the defining punk release of the Britpop era, an album that, tho not quite as strong b/c not as urgent as Germ Free Adolescents, comes closest to that power. The 90s were an experiment in excessive self-assuredness & Elastica's eponymous debut is the best representation of that zeitgeist this side of Definitely Maybe. But Oasis's first, irrespective of John Lydon's influence on Liam, is not a punk album - it's simply not fast enuf. But this one's fast & thoroughly punk - & you can see its effect on subsequent acts such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. At the end of the day, Elastica isn't special, a mien not an essence. So what?

A fine, but dumb, concept, whatever, that's rock 'n' roll sometimes - I don't like this shit b/c it's annoying e'en before it's pretentious. Folk who decry rock music for its annoyingness have a premier case in point w/ this record, a collection of songs that are as pointless as they are frustratingly heady & soulless. 'Flying, soaring / Shining morning / Never leaving / Lying, dying.' If I wanted British conceptual, I'd go for The Kinks before almost anyone - I just don't buy this group's attempt at sixties wit, like, wink, wink, what's the joke? 'I Can See For Miles' contains some classic Moon drumming, but its hook goes on for miles & miles, repetitive b/c Daltrey doesn't know how to write a good tune. Nope, not e'en close, The Who DID NOT presage punk.