Reviews by verlainemorrison96

Reggae, dub, house, big beat, + afrocentrism to top it all off, so what's not to like, but then again, what's there to love? Probably a whole lot - if you were there & possessed the password - but for this generous listener, tho not a matter of cold admiration, the record isn't a breathtaking affair, i.e., there's no there there &, while we're at it, no here here. What I mean: it's impressively impressive, & not much else. That's too bad - I'd love for an album called Leftism to exceed the bill - but alas, it only fits it (sometimes). A good find then, just not good for long.

My guess is radical chic (Tom Wolfe a dickhead tho). & yet, from a sonic perspective, pretty darn good, even if it’s politically on the nose. I simply prefer my politics to be on the loose. +, I prefer Solange, Blood Orange, Kendrick Lamar, Toni Morrison.

Was Nina Simone the first literary artist to come out of the jazz, soul, rock 'n' roll circuit? I mean, where the hell does a song like 'Four Women' come from? 'I'm awfully bitter these days / 'Cause my parents were slaves.' It's all part of a tradition, as all experimental art is, but one almost forgets just how explosively avant-garde Nina is, & that's following in the footsteps of a plethora of unorthodox black artists, from Armstrong thru Sun Ra. I don't think I've ever been in love with her music, but in a sense I'm always falling in love w/ it, b/c whenever I put on her best moments I wonder where she had been all these years, & that's on me. She sings not as if every word is her last, but as if each is her first, & she's reinventing language on the fly.

This one grows on you. Just not that much, more like a 2 to a 2.1 ‘Badhead.’

In '97, there were 767 murders in New York City, the locale that presumably sets the backdrop to this album. That's far fewer than there were in 1990, which was a record-setting 2,605. I mention this b/c David Holmes clearly has violence on the mind. But this is no horror flic as electronic music - it's get-up-&-go-music, even or especially if that going's motive is a let's-get-killed-sort-of-thing. I appreciate the documentarian aspects of the project. Nevertheless, the energies of the record are somatic rather than wholly or importantly cinematic. Don't try to dance to it - it's too cerebral - but don't try to think w/ it - it ain't that deep. Just let yourself go to it, get killed to it, be a part of something bigger than yourself. An unwonted classic, I submit.

'Surely ain't nothin' that we can't do'; 'Feels, feels just like I'm in heaven.' I had to pinch myself to see if this really was as gloriously bright & promising as I heard it to be upon first impression. But yeah, what you have here is a gorgeous record on top of a sophisticated one, an album that's slow enuf to get into your heart & your head. I mean, this is straight up gospel music + Simon & Garfunkel + The Velvet Underground + Big Star. If you require a project that'll convince you to occasionally take a look outside the window - to see that there's more to it than you could imagine - this is that project. It's a miracle of noise & apprehension, of peace & distortion. The talking is a bit of a drag, as it is on Spirderland. No matter tho, a dimensional album.

A cousin of Mos Def’s The New Danger, The Roots’ Phrenology is not the outfit’s greatest record, but it’s probably the best introduction to what they do so well & why they’re such a necessary footprint in hip hop history. While some of these tracks put me to bed, I recognize that The Roots are at their most interesting when they are most intent on straddling the lines between pure & pop, rap & rock/r&b. Black Thought is a lyricist’s lyricist, but he also has a knack for hooks & songs. The freestyler on Funk Master Flex is also the composer of The Seed (2.0), & that should be celebrated.

I've never been keen on the English singing 'bout England - The Clash, the Sex Pistols, to me they sing about universal themes - but count on Polly to be an exception to just about every rule out there. PJ is also universal, but the record is undoubtedly curated for the British sentiment. 'Death was in the ancient fortress / Shelled by a million bullets / From gunners waiting in the copses / W/ hearts that threatened to pop their boxes.' That Harvey is literary goes w/o saying, but here she goes for the highest registers of the form: you can almost hear the echoes of Wilfred Owen & Isaac Rosenberg in these lines. Not as transcendent as her earlier works - it's all a bit too grave in the end - but her genius is a forceful reminder of her joys & reality.

'Now my heart is full / & I just can't explain / So I won't even try to.' Yeah, I think this is as good as The Queen Is Dead, & Morrissey is honestly a more impressive storyteller on his fourth solo release. He receives his points for not loosing himself in obscurantist fantasies at the same time that he's not the poster child for realism/naturalism. 'I said, Billy Budd / I would happily lose both of my legs.' Topped off w/ greater rock 'n' roll spirit than he ever did muster w/ The Smiths, Morrissey may not be the greatest songwriter of all time, but he's second to none for a certain brand of pop madness, b/c that is what this is: a mad, mad tribute to pop music.

Regrettably, more Björk, and Chance the Rapper, than Janis Joplin, but still really quite brilliant since she sincerely has all three in her. I just wonder what it’d be like to hear her more purely than in an experimental tone. Not ersatz tho, just too heady at times, & I enjoy her more as an ambassador of soul qua the rawest soul than soul qua the voice of an oddball queen.

A good as it gets, it somehow keeps getting better. There’s nothing quite like it, & you know it can’t be all that simple, but it is & it isn’t. Yes, it’s the adolescent energy that brings it to life, as it is w/ Chuck Berry, but it’s also the most noble of that rock ‘n’ roll thing, painting it well & real, & taking you to church while they're at it. The cutest music in the world that just may be the deepest too.

'& I've lost the line between right or wrong / I just want to find the place where I belong.' A bit affected perhaps, Beth Orton reminds me some of Beth Gibbons, the lead singer of Portishead, tho the folk-country version, not the jazz-cabaret edition. But there's a lovingness involved, something that tells me it's all for the right reasons. '& I'm always walking down the escalator / The up way.' A beauty too, a simple, go-to beauty, one fulfilling & purifying, especially 'Pass in Time.'

Here’s what I’ll say about this: it ain’t good.

'Murder, murder / Commit cold-blooded murder / Like Nazis during World War II / They only follow orders.' Oh wow, that's some profound shit, I almost don't know what to say. While I take to some of the thrash drums & the punky vibes, I don't care for what Among The Living is in essence, an album that's boring, lifeless, repetitious, purposeless. It's Belladonna & his tough-not-tough screaming & his brief moments of melodiousness that are the real tough sell for me. Literally ever track sounds the same - the same exact riffs, the same pounding drums, & the same vocals that revel in the same trying to get a point across that's no point at all. 'Apathy can never solve.' That's like a 12-year-old trying to sneak in a 'big' word to impress.

'Tyler is guilty, a white judge has said so / What right do we have to say it's not so?' Appreciating the politics of an artist is not a sustainable practice, particularly for a leftist like myself, which is not to say that there's no great leftist art, or that conservatives have an aesthetic advantage in this regard, only that political leanings are neither necessary nor sufficient. W/ UB40, this fact comes to the fore almost immediately, Ali Campbell lamenting the unjust sentencing of a black man by a white judge, a righteous project but not done engagingly or charmingly. Just compare this group to The Clash, or The Specials, & it's apparent who gets it & who doesn't. Besides a few moments of blessed reggaeism, Campbell is just too whiney to fit the bill.

'In the center of the ring / They are torturing a bear.' Academic is the word to describe this psychedelic mess, at once far stranger than Sgt. Pepper's & yet more solid, more lucid. A third Jefferson Airplane, a third Byrds, & a third Washington Irving on strong LA acid, The United States Of America is about as inevitable as the night resolving itself into day, but the inevitability is shot thru w/ invention, w/ soul, & w/ vitality, so whatever you may find to be annoyingly intellectual, e.g., the silly interludes of traditional, old-world instrumentals, is balanced by Dorothy Moskowitz's vocal profundity, which matches Grace Slick's, & the authentic psychedelic blues that is this thing. My least favorite is 'Where is Yesterday,' but even that one's got a purpose.

For a record this long & so-called ambitious, there's an unwonted naïveté & a naturalness that renders the whole experience not only worthwhile but an organic enterprise. & I go for that sort of thing. 'Each day we get closer to the big bad fire / I looked down at the sickness in you.' Eclecticism is not the same thing as random variety, but Peggy Suicide has a sense of both cohesive diversity as well as scattershot energy: Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, oh I don't know, how about Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, & Alex Chilton, all these styles & more are featured, but I also get the feeling for a personality that I guess we can only attribute to Julian Cope himself. Whoever he is, I don't care much for the looks of him, but this album in a vacuum, yeah, real deal.

Memorably unmemorable, i.e., these French, Swiss, & Argentines give you vague moods & modes but no true-to-life experience. There's something luxuriant 'bout the record, something that brings to mind penthouses w/ a whole lotta bad (abstract) art on the wall, but the dinner is good enuf to be sufficiently distracted & therefore content. I think the seventh track has it right: this is 'foreign capitalism' ('el capitalismo foráneo'), which means it feigns difference but is really just more of the same. Mostly, it's a lethargic affair, & gets more sluggish as the beat goes on, but at least there's a beat, & the strings do add a nineteenth-century flavor that I dig. If reality be the thing, don't come here. If it be luxury, come on, but expect a faux helping.

'Recuerda se ven las caras / Y jamás el corazón.' & from the Danish prince: 'Now get you to my lady's chamber, & tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.' This is to say, I was expecting salsa, however that might manifest, not full-blown leftism, but was happy to find that this is the best feel-good-think-thru-music this side of Sly Stone. 'La vida te da sorpresas / Sorpresas te da la vida.' Sonic-wise, Siembra is unaccountable - it's conventional b/c it's folk-oriented but it's also completely out there, a musical (West Side Story), a social critique, & a p-funk explosion (shoutout to bassist Salvador Cuevas). Like the niños on the cover, the record is out of place in all the best ways: the bizarrest, lightest, gravest dance record.

'Just keep an open mind / & then suddenly you'll find / Never Never Land.' W/ Something/Anything?, the jury was very much in for me - Rundgren had what it took to make a sophisticated pop record, one that boasted complex melodies but real songs, as Stevie Wonder is wont to do. The jury is also in for me w/ A Wizard, A True Star, but unfortunately it's not a positive note. I don't mind concepts, but mostly dislike conceptual; I'd go for experiments, but I'm happy to omit experimental. In other words, give me a record that explores & pushes the frontiers, not one that begins so conspicuously on the fringes. 'You want the obvious / You'll get the obvious.' This is an okay to bad psychedelic prog album, & covering Smokey does Todd no favors.