Reviews by verlainemorrison96

East Londoner Matt Johnson is probably the most unlikely funk hero of the 80s, but here I am, taking in the The's debut, & these synth-pop classics do for me what few other optimisms do: 'This is the day (this is the day) / Your life will surely change.' Even when they're singing of the 'symptom of the moral decay / That's gnawing at the heart of the . . . country,' there is a level of sanguinity that pervades the record that's as irresistible as crystal waters & cloudless skies. 'Uncertain emotions force an uncertain smile.' In the vein of neither Joy Division, The Smiths, nor The Cure, the The defines a third way, one that doesn't fight for glory but assumes its reliability. Soul Mining is an underrated classic. Appropriately, I feel moved to underrate it.

'Young lust, better keep your daughter inside / Or she's gonna get a dose of my pride.' As a rule, any record that succumbs to that sort of lyricism, which is boring aesthetically rather than cancelable misogyny, is unlikely to impress, but I'll give Pump the benefit of the doubt & concede that, on the whole, it's better that I had expected. Effective hooks ('Going Down/Love In An Elevator'), hard driving guitars, thudding drums, & Tyler's now classic vocal stylings all provide for an album that boasts actual songs, albeit not exactly my cup of tea. The problem is that you learn pretty quickly what a lot of us now take for granted: by '89, hip-hop was taking central stage, & generic rock yawned its way to irrelevancy. I was pumped for this to end.

Bush's most Bowie-like record, in terms of attitude & theatrical antics, The Dreaming is weird even for Kate's performative standards. 'You learn to ride the Earth / When you're living on your belly / & the enemy is city-birth.' I've got no clue what that means, & it doesn't strike me as necessary to go find out what it may signify. W/ this said, this is no pretentious album, & by the time 'Suspended in Gaffa' concludes, you've been seized by what can be called Bush's magnetic creativity. There are artists & albums that, w/o any lingering doubt, exhibit the highest levels of creative energy, but they end up leaving you cold & uninspired. This is not that, & as much as I love Wuthering Heights & Running Up That Hill, as a full project, this is the best.

'Green grass was purple black & speckled all around.' Art rock embracing the accessible & the pleasures of 'music' - 'I'm lost in music / Feel so alive' - is no foolproof blueprint for converting the skeptics, but it can work & it works in this case. Mark E. Smith has a clarity of voice & vision here, each track slams just enuf, sings just enuf, & moves just enuf to be an authentic meeting of pop & art, while the '93 energy is delightfully '79. 'I hope I can quickly learn the language, eh.' That'd be the language of a group knowing they can't hold onto their obscurantist darlings but that they can hold onto something. Sure, some of this is just Smith rambling, scrambling over pop-friendly instrumentals, but if pleasure be the key, this gives me that. A lot.

'My rage is blowing gauges / How long it take to validate your wages?' The Birmingham native Mark Skinner reminds me of the Minnesota rapper Slug from Atmosphere: saccharine tho undoubtedly an impressive songwriter, & this bloke's got humor/irony to boot. The production, ranging from the soft piano tracks that pepper the album & more aggressive ventures, is a true + exciting support system for a network of averages. The whole thing is, in other words, an exploration of life at its most average manifestation. & yet, A Grand Don't Come For Free is a rap opera, & should be judged as such. This means comparing it to the best of the best of that niche, heralded by Prince Paul's A Prince Among Thieves. It's not quite that, & it's a bit dated.

W/ the Ramones as the innovators, fifties rock 'n' roll was always the chief influence on American punk, but X takes that rockabilly element to another level on Wild Gift, i.e., this is about the strangest but most sensible 'prom' record you're liable to hear. 'Landlord, landlord, landlord / Cleaning up the mess.' The politics are certainly there, & X gives Gang of Four a run for its money as the radical post-punk group of the eighties, but the 'statements' don't encumber, they only enhance. Mostly tho, the thirteen tracks making up this album are simply great songs, the brief gems you'd get in the fifties or on a Ramones thing, but w/ less redundancy & schtickiness than the five Forest Hills natives, as much as I am a devotee to the Queens outfit. A gift.

Saying something is 'ahead of its time' is usually a cop out way of uttering your appreciation for a work of art that seems to be paving truly unique & fresh angles, but this really is 'ahead of its time.' Essentially a more stoned & instrumental approach to Steely Dan's mastery of form, Can has created an album that ignites the pleasure receptors while also being an indulgently cognitive opus, in the best way imaginable. At a time when prog ruined a whole lot of what could otherwise be movingly intellectual, it's a quiet, or a not so quiet, miracle that a record like this could exist & exist so joyfully. At the end of the day, this works b/c it's happy, slappy, & rapturous. 'Spinning down alone, you spin alive.' That's what I'm talking about. Or is it floating?

'I may talk in my sleep tonight / 'Cause I don't know what I am.' Simplified & energized by punk curtness, Elliott Smith is our best acoustic average - giving us much by way of little, poetry by way of brief hits of sincerity, he is, at his most impressive, tho not one of one, perhaps one of four or five, i.e., not totally but certainly unique. 'The spin of the earth impaled a silhouette / Of the sun on the steeple.' That he's S-A-D seems obvious enuf, but like his precursor Nick Drake, there's a sense of life & of exuberance, especially w/ Smith's power- & pop-driven guitar playing. +, the show-tune piano is a giddy touch ('In the Lost and Found'). It's the voice, however, that's both a weak link & an inevitability - a bit annoying, but necessary, but unavoidable.

'Reagan's president elect / Fascist God in motion.' The opening track, far & away the best here, is still not an all-time great, an anthemic response to fascist tendencies that's neither a vigorous takedown nor a funky, clarifying clap back. The rest is essentially faux soul, a whole lotta of clunkiness, & a bad take on 80s synth-pop that also feels like a mediocre reflection of the turnings & burnings of the emerging hip-hop scene. 'It's all that I can give to be a fugitive.' Incoherence like this evinces the dry & faceless qualities of the album, which is never interesting & approaches terrible on songs like 'Geisha Boys and Temple Girls.' The Mad Men who populate the cover are the real artists here & offer no ironic gesture, i.e., this is beige office music.

'It's much too dark to see the stranger / So she thinks of shoes instead.' An odd one, Ackles is an ok, agreeable alloy of Tom Waits, Randy Newman, & Billy Joel w/ some of the show-tune antics of Scott Walker &, unusually, the vocal inflections of Grace Slick. While I don't enjoy the parodistic flavors of many of these tracks, particularly 'Ballad of the Ship of State' or the numb 'Oh, California!,' the Sinatra in him (wee-small-hours-Sinatra) works the rare miracle w/ songs like 'One Night Stand.' At only 36 mins of action tho, the record feels too long b/c it's rather unmotivated & Ackles is not a very durable talent. 'Never stayed in one place long 'less I was doin' time.' +, I don't know what's particularly gothic about it. More like a portrait of meh.

W/ more jump & pace than Deep Purple displays on the two studio albums I have heard of theirs, which weren't any good, this live record still drives me nuts, even tho the instrumental prowess is clear. It's not palpable tho - the talent is obvious enuf, but soul is replaced by self-seriousness, & Ian Gillan mixes the pot w/ a one-note campaign that often takes away from whatever enjoyment I get out of the album instrumentally. There are moments here & there that remind me of the blessed aliveness of the Allman Brothers at Fillmore East, but they're few & far between, & at its worst, Made in Japan flaunts cheesy modulations that reek not only of metal but prog absurdity. It's the organ I think, the organ that takes bands like DP from bad to shite.

''Cos if you wanna fight then you're just dying to get killed.' Welp, this is . . . really, really good. Harkening back to The Kinks & The Beatles, hell, even Gerry & the Pacemakers, i.e., these blokes are sixties thru & thru, they're also foreshadowers of an indie explosion that would start w/ R.E.M. These tracks are full of 'positive vibrations,' sitars, & anti-war messaging, but the record is not nostalgic for the sixties, it just knows where to go to catch the muse of great rock 'n' roll pop. I'm inclined to call Underwater Moonlight the British Marquee Moon, so full of verve, attitude, & adolescent spirit it is, but Television will always be #1 for me. This is yet about as fantastic a find that I've recently come across. 'On the rim of a vacuum jar.' Bloody right.

'& our freedom's consuming itself / What we've become.' Whatever Muse is getting at, which is some sort of miserable gravity pull of Coldplay w/ the worst aspects of Radiohead, I can do w/o. This's not profound: 'Our hopes & expectations / Black holes & revelations, yeah.' At best it's hokey, a drab conceptual piece that goes w/ no mood, at worst it's a blasted resurrection of prog sensibilities that should've died out after The Wall. There's nerdy & pretentious, there's dense & vapid, & somehow Black Holes & Revelations is all four. 'Why can't we see / That when we bleed, we bleed the same?' It gets worse as it goes along, & anytime you think they've figured something out, it's ruined by space sounds, tedious drama, & Bellamy's bad singing.

'Any way you run, you run before us / Black & white horse arching among us.' As white as The Shins, meaning as white as you can get, Beach House makes music just as gorgeous as The Shins', meaning as gorgeous as this perspective can produce. 'You let us in the wooden house / To share in all the wealth.' Dreamy in all facets of the word, that is, dreamy b/c luxuriant & walled-off from reality, Teen Dream is produced to a sweet perfection, & its loving cadences are no soulless messages of luxury. But rampant lushness like this is for folk w/ a beach house, or multiple, not for the common lot of humanity. Do I think there's no place for music like this? I do not, hence a rating that expresses my appreciation. But yeah, they're finally too pallid.

'So unloved / I took 'em standin' up / So stuck up / Raaawr!'; 'Choke, choke, choke, choke'; 'I got a man who makes the devil pale.' Not as good as The Strokes b/c they lack the hits but better than The Strokes b/c they're way splashier & way punkier. Karen O is a legitimate inheritor of Poly Styrene & Polly Jean Harvey, only two tracks here hit the four min mark, & the overall flavor is an up-to-no-good-don't-give-a-fuck-mash. Madder & louder than you're likely to recall, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are no innocent pop statement, but hard as nails & boast experimental bravado. Don't say you've heard it all before - this is a fantastic installment of good ol' rock 'n' roll w/ a whole lot to say b/c it doesn't say too much. 'Time time is gone / It never lasts.'

'Kind of sad / Kind of mad / Ghetto child / Thinkin' he's been had.' Reason why this record doesn't just hold up but continues to astonish is that Curtis keeps it real deal simple. 'Ain't I clean? / Bad machine / Super cool / Super mean.' This is the ABCs of ghetto life, ghetto networks, ghetto tragedy, & ghetto death, setting the groundwork for hip-hop realism that would come onto the scene a decade following, e.g., 'The Message.' 'Ain't nothing said / 'Cause Freddie's dead.' Sonically, it's a blast, the soundtracking aspects yielding cinematic frames for details that ought to be visualized to begin w/. It really has become a classic of the American arts, & I have yet to see the movie. Optimism too: 'I'm so glad I've got my own / So glad that I can see.'

This has got flow, focus, & fun for a good 20 to 25 min, but their impressive but not too impactful imitation of Pavement, especially Conor Deasy's one-note facsimile of Stephen Malkmus, tho not good for nothing, isn't all that good for many things. Not lacking in talent or good songwriting, what they don't got is creativity, i.e., precisely the thing that makes Pavement the 90s band of laid-back thrills & testimonies to noise, nothings, & experiment. I'd admit to enjoying each track as it plays out to the end more than I figured I would, but these are mostly songs that pass thru one ear & out the other - I can't say I remember much of what they signified. 'Those Hollywood kids, those Hollywood kids got it made.' Ireland a la trademarked Cali: eh, meh.

People rightfully point to Scott-Heron & The Last Poets as the progenitors of hip-hop, but Gil is the more explainable & precedented phenomenon in that he's carrying on the legacies of folk like Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, & Sly Stone. Never a great singer, he yet doesn't need to be, nor does he have to be a great lyricist, even tho the lyrics are more front & center than the voice. This is a record/an artist of religious vivacity, + a keyboardist in Brian Jackson w/ enuf Jarrett & Monk in him to distinctly impress. 'Rivers of my Fathers / Could you carry me home?' Afrocentrism certainly didn't begin w/ Heron, & he's not only that kind of artist ('A Very Precious Time'), but one's gotta count him amongst the best movers of those perspectives.

This record has you thinking that something’s bound to happen, but it ne’er will. In other words, it's cheaply suspenseful. That can be fun, & Phaedra is for the most part a soundtrack to a fun albeit odd, pretentious sci-fi film that was ne’er released, but it’s also lacking in bounce & humor, i.e., it’s not vital enuf to sustain our interest. Clearly composed w/ the whole universe in mind, it’s yet not as cosmic as Tangerine Dream conceived it to be. B/c its loops aren’t given much room to breathe or expand, the album is stuck in a palatial abyss that I don’t quite know what to do w/. Tho I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt - it’s certainly better than a lot of the prog it would go on to influence - it’s still no special or magical work of art. Pretty sterile.

'Wreck my plans, that's my man.' Talented & era-defining, yet nondescript & wanting of palpable energy, Swift is not this age's songwriter, she's its v gifted narcissist, its honed employer of the 'lyrical I,' the spokesperson for no one but herself. Rhyming 'brought it' w/ 'applauded' & 'called it' evinces Costello-like skill, & she obviously has a knack for pop melodies, but for an hour I didn't care much for what she had to say next. 'In our history, across our great divide / There is a glorious sunrise.' No doubt, the country & the blues traditions teach you to sing w/ personal intent. W/ those deep & clear country roots, Swift gives you the personal w/o the personality. She is no Patsy, Tammy, Dolly, or Loretta, & yeah, she's no Olivia Rodrigo. All blank.