BILL WITHERS: NAKED & WARM (1976)
1) Close To Me; 2) Naked &
Warm; 3) Where You Are; 4) Dreams; 5) If I Didn't Mean You Well; 6) I'll Be
With You; 7) City Of The Angels; 8) My Imagination.
It is always at least a little sad to see a
favourite artist turn from the utmost sincerity to arrogant dishonesty.
Nevertheless, we must brace ourselves
and face the facts. There is definitely a serious probability as to Bill
Withers being «warm» on that album sleeve, given its immediate context — sunny
skies, a summer attire, and suitable ultraviolet-ray-blocking headwear. But
unless my eyes trick me into some sort of optical illusion, I would state it as
a given fact that the description «naked» does not apply at all. One never
knows, of course, whether this could be an act of last-moment censorship
imposed upon the artist by the record label, but even so, the album cover is
tacky enough without the title — with the title, it's tacky and self-contradictory. And it is with
this troubled feeling of deception already creeping in that we proceed on to
the music.
And — sure enough — the music more or less
matches the album cover in terms of tackiness and self-contradictions. Most of
the songs still show the same disappointing direction, towards soft, thoroughly
inoffensive balladry and soft funk grooves that take the bill out of the withers
without providing anything in return. Keyboards have completely taken over as
the musical foundation, with that typical mid-1970s sound that dissolves the
musical bone under the pretty skin. And it no longer matters whether any of
this is or is not properly «disco» — I've heard dozens of «legit» disco tunes
that had far more grit and snappiness to them than something as instantly
forgettable as ʽWhere You Areʼ, even if the latter has a fairly tricky time
signature.
The only tunes that register even a tiny bit
are the title track — only because it
turns into a repetitive, but enigmatic, jam in the end, where Bill keeps
asking us whether we want to go to Heaven in such a worried tone that one might
start believing that really ain't such a good idea; and ʽDreamsʼ, where the
electric piano, bass guitar, and synthesizer engage in a pleasant enough trialog
while our host for the evening is trying to convince us that "dreams are
as good as the real thing sometimes". At least the tonality of the song
gives us a whiff of the old paranoid Bill Withers, not this new romantic face,
indistinguishable in a crowd of similar faces.
Worst of the lot, unfortunately, and the one
song that I would really consider a
«failure», as opposed to the «nothingness» of the rest, is the sprawling 10-minute
epic ʽCity Of The Angelsʼ, Bill's sudden attempt at going «artsy» on us.
Starting off with a 4-minute proto-disco groove, he then shatters it in a sea
of analog and digital keyboard sprinkle, and the next six minutes are all spent
wading through this quasi-ambient sonic mush. It is almost as if he were really
writing a song about an «angel city» (the tune as such is about Los Angeles, as
we could all guess), and thought that the perfect soundtrack to a gathering of
angels would be this atmospheric «piano soup» — but, to tell the truth, if this
kind of atmosphere is typical of angels, then I'd just as rather not go to Heaven, thank you very much. Nothing
against ambient muzak per se, but these
arrangements sound like one lengthy boring prelude to an equally boring
generic fusion jam.
On the whole, this might just be the single
lowest point in Bill's career, and I have no idea what he was thinking to
himself at the time, unless he was on drugs or something (then again, California
occasionally has this really unhealthy anti-artistic effect on Easterners) —
one of those cases where a thumbs down is quite well correlated with the
fact that the album was not released on CD until 2010. For very major fans only.
This is my least favorite Bill Withers album. It's so boring and samey and tuneless, and then one gets to "City Of The Angels"... I think he was beginning to crack under the album-a-year formula everyone labored under then. After this, I notice wider gaps between his albums, and better results.
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