BILLY BRAGG: MERMAID AVENUE VOL. II (w. Wilco) (2000)
1) Airline To Heaven; 2) My
Flying Saucer; 3) Feed Of Man; 4) Hot Rod Hotel; 5) I Was Born; 6) Secrets Of
The Sea; 7) Stetson Kennedy; 8) Remember The Mountain Bed; 9) Blood Of The
Lamb; 10) Against The Law; 11) All You Fascists; 12) Joe DiMaggio Done It
Again; 13) Meanest Man; 14) Black Wind Blowing; 15) Someday Some Morning
Sometime.
Okay, almost everyone says this one's not so
good, and how could it be? Maybe the impressive success of the first volume was
not enough to make them go back into the studio and record some more — but it
was enough to make them release most of the stuff that did not make it onto Vol. I, and if these are outtakes,
well, there must have been reasons for their being outtakes from the very
beginning, right? Scraps are scraps,
even if you're a giant of popular music.
Honestly, though, I do not share this popular
opinion about the sequel being so seriously inferior. Maybe it is because I do
not view the original Mermaid Avenue
as a masterpiece — merely as a very pleasant, very insightful, very tasteful
synthetic exercise — and without elevated expectations for the sequel, the
sequel just comes across as yet another such exercise. In fact, one reason why
these songs were discarded originally may have been not the lack of quality,
but their being generally much more distant from the standards of «folk rock»
than the songs on the first album: here, Billy and Jeff really go a long way, adapting Woody's words to so many different
musical styles that poor Woody must have rolled over in his grave much more
than once. They may have ditched some of this first time around just so as not
to have Norah scratch her head and wonder whether the decision to entrust this
stuff to a couple of modernist clowns was such a good idea in the first place.
But second time around... there's just no stopping them.
See for yourself. ʽMy Flying Saucerʼ is a
folk-pop song all right... in Buddy Holly, not Woody Guthrie style (starts out
ʽPeggy Sueʼ style). ʽFeed Of Manʼ is a slide guitar-heavy swamp rocker that sounds
like Rory Gallagher with Brian Jones on second guitar. ʽSecrets Of The Seaʼ is
an indie pop song that is 100% Summerteeth-era
Wilco. ʽAll You Fascistsʼ is speedy blues-rock with crazy guitar and harmonica
romps that may have been inspired by Five
Live Yardbirds. And weirdest of all is ʽMeanest Manʼ, a song with such
strange lyrics that the only thing Bragg could do about it was turn it into a
wannabe Tom Waits number... and sing
it like Tom Waits, too. (Why didn't they try to get the real Tom Waits, I wonder? They got Natalie Merchant and Corey
Harris as guest stars — Tom Waits would kick their limp folksy asses).
Most of the other songs, too, sound very much
«appropriated» by either Tweedy or Bragg, to the extent that the album closer,
ʽSomeday Some Morning Sometimeʼ, a gentle ballad with kaleidoscopic electronic
overdubs, would seem like a natural predecessor to the futuristic «folktronic»
soundscapes of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Most importantly, they use Woody's lyrics to create moods that go way beyond Woody's lyrics — yes, it is true
that these lyrics show us a much more profound and diverse Guthrie than the
Dust Bowl Poet stereotype, but these guys go further than that: ʽBlood Of The
Lambʼ, for instance, is cast as a bitter, sarcastic cabaret vaudeville, where
Tweedy's vocals take on an almost mocking air as he sings that "I've
learnt to love my peoples / Of all colors, creeds and kinds / I'm all washed in
the blood of that lamb". Was it supposed
to be ironic? Maybe it was. Who the heck knows?
Or ʽMeanest Manʼ — okay, so Woody writes about
all those evil things that he could
have been, but he isn't because of
the kindness of the people around him; is it right, then, to have the song
delivered pirate-style, as if the protagonist were the meanest man? Or maybe he really is? Maybe this is just a tiny hint at the creepy dark side of the
man?.. Oh God, perhaps Norah should have reconsidered, after all. Then again,
if the original intent was to create a multi-dimensional portrait of a man
equally beset by angels and demons on all sides, then this is exactly what
Billy and Jeff are doing for us here. They may have largely invented this
portrait, filling in all the blank spaces with bits of their own personalities
(Billy the streetwise jester and Jeff the idealistic dreamer), but there
probably was a little bit of each in the old Woody anyway, so no prob.
In any case, as far as the songwriting and the arrangements
are concerned, half of these tunes are bona fide Billy Bragg tunes, the other
half is first-to-second-rate Wilco, a must have for all fans of the classic Wilco
sound, and as a special bonus you get another
brief acoustic ditty tenderly sung by Natalie Merchant's faience shepherdess —
shake it, but don't break it; it's a good thing, after all, that nobody tried
to make a 10,000 Maniacs album out of this set of lyrics, «This Guitar Kills
Politically Incorrect Male Chauvinists»-style. This one gets another safe,
friendly thumbs
up. And please note that, as of 2012, both are also available
together as Mermaid Avenue: The Complete
Sessions, a sprawling boxset that adds yet a third bonus CD of even more stuff, which I have not heard so far,
but I'm pretty sure that three's good company, and judging by Amazon prices,
it's also quite a good bargain compared to buying all the stuff separately.
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