Brinsley Schwarz: Hen's Teeth

BRINSLEY SCHWARZ: HEN'S TEETH (1967-1975; 1998)

1) Shy Boy; 2) Lady On A Bicycle; 3) Rumours; 4) And She Cried; 5) Tell Me A Story; 6) Understand A Woman; 7) Tomorrow, Today; 8) Turn Out The Light; 9) In My Life; 10) I Can See Her Face; 11) Hypocrite; 12) The Version; 13) I've Cried My Last Tear; 14) (It's Gonna Be A) Bring Down; 15) Everybody; 16) I Like You, I Don't Love You; 17) Day Tripper; 18) Slow Down; 19) I Should Have Known Better; 20) Tell Me Why; 21) There's A Cloud In My Heart; 22) I Got The Real Thing.

Somebody's love for Brinsley Schwarz must have been bubbling indeed, if it prompted its victim to assemble such a painstakingly meticulous compilation of just about every studio-based rarity that the band put out during its lifetime and much, much beyond that. Because formally, only a few of these tracks are credited to «Brinsley Schwarz». The first ten tracks represent the small legacy of Kippington Lodge, with Nick Lowe joining in only about midway through and only having enough time to contribute one single song. Tracks 17-20 are Beatles covers that were re­corded by the Brinsleys all right, some time in late 1974, but were anonymously credited to «The Knees» and «Limelight», two different bands with two different styles (!). Tracks 11-12 are yet another stab at anonymity as «The Hitters», from 1973.

Finally, the last two tracks have them as simply «The Brinsleys» — an odd attempt at name shortening right before the break-up: did they think it was the name Schwarz that prevented them from fame and fortune? (Come to think of it, does anybody know of any famous and fortunate Schwarzes from the UK? Maybe there was something to the idea). And thus, only tracks 13-16 are properly billed to «Brinsley Schwarz», with two singles from 1974-75, neither of which is credited to Lowe or Gomm, either (the B-sides are, but one of the B-sides, ʽI Like You I Don't Love Youʼ, was already available on New Favourites anyway).

It isn't much of a pain to sort through this mess, given that all the information is laid out in the track listings and liner notes. It isn't that much of a great pleasure, though, to sit through the music, either: only by some anomalous miracle could an album of Brinsley Schwarz and «para-Brinsley Schwarz» rarities turn out to be as good as, let alone better than their regular output. It ain't much worse, either, but I doubt that, apart from a tiny handful of these tracks, anything here could truly satisfy even the most forgiving fan of the band — heck, even the liner notes, written in an age when raving and ranting liner notes are written about anything, admit that, well, you know, it ain't no great shakes, but, you know, historical importance, charming period pieces, the regular drill. And yeah, they're kinda right about it.

The Kippington Lodge stuff shows what we'd probably expect to see — yet another bunch of nice, clean, well-meaning kids striving to be the Beatles, but falling somewhere in between the Hollies and just about every other band you heard on Nuggets II. Most of the songs are from outside songwriters: for instance, the first song, ʽShy Boyʼ, was donated to them by Tomorrow (the Steve Howe-nurturing band of ʽMy White Bicycleʼ fame), although this excited the band so much that they tried to write the B-side themselves — and, of course, it was named ʽLady On A Bicycleʼ, because, you know, bicycles are so British and so psychedelic ever since Albert Hofmann rode one. To be fair, neither of them sounds like the Beatles: ʽShy Boyʼ is a music hall number much closer to the Kinks, and ʽLadyʼ is more of a swingin' jazz-pop ditty with a sappy chorus that's more Mamas & Papas than Lennon/McCartney.

In fact, when they do tackle Lennon/McCartney directly, it sounds awful: ʽIn My Lifeʼ, released in May 1969, coincided with the era of "let us reimagine early Beatles songs as grandiose art-pop epics!" (remember ʽEvery Little Thingʼ by Yes?) and has wailing distorted guitars, organs, ins­trumental breaks and vocals overdriven into frenzy mode by the end. The B-side to that single was Lowe's first solo original: ʽI Can See Her Faceʼ, a mournful guitar-organ slab of soul-pop that will bring to mind early Deep Purple, but with every aspect of early Deep Purple brought down to amateur level. Endearing, perhaps, but as forgettable as every other song by this early incarnation of the band — real gallant name, though, that Kippington Lodge.

Of the other stuff, «anonymous» or no, only two tracks caught my attention: ʽEverybodyʼ was curious because it probably has the heaviest sound the band was ever allowed in the studio, with such a gruff riff that, for a brief second, it opens them a little bit of that door into the Sweet / T. Rex league (not that this is necessarily a plus — just noting that they so very rarely sounded «glam», every such attempt jumps to attention). And of those Beatles covers from 1974-75, al­though ʽDay Tripperʼ and ʽSlow Downʼ, which «The Knees» play in rock mode, are pitiful, the other two tracks, which «Limelight» play in «artsy» mode, are much less so — especially ʽI Should Have Known Betterʼ, where I really appreciate how they take the song into another di­mension by replacing the harmonica with the organ and the guitar solo with strings,  so it's a «Hard Day's Night meets Procol Harum and The Moody Blues» kind of event that deserves to be heard, maybe even in a higher status than just «historical curio».

Another historical curio is that the Leroy Sibbles ska song, ʽHypocriteʼ, turns out to have been first recorded as a vocal version — with very pretty vocal harmonies at that — and ʽThe Versionʼ was its instrumental track, for some reason released as the B-side; and then, for an even stranger reason, it was the instrumental rather than the vocal version to make it as the coda for Please Don't Ever Change. Accident? Humility? Copyright issues? Anyway, just another example in a series of tiny odd blunders that probably contributed to their career never taking off.

Anyway, it all sounds okay, and in each such retrospective there is at least an instructive value — with the Kippington Lodge tracks, for instance, you can quickly and succinctly track down much of the general evolution of the UK musical scene from 1967 to 1969, starting out as wispy, sensi­tive, music-hall influenced psycho-pop and then gradually getting bleak, thick, and heavy, with layers of vanilla fudge strewn over grand funk railroads — that is, before the roots-rock craze sets in and we become all downhome and earthy and stuff. Not that the Brinsleys always followed this simplistic model, but ultimately, this was a band that could not overcome somebody else's limi­tations and fully come into its own — in the logical end, this is why Hen's Teeth is indeed an appropriate title for this collection.

Brinsley Schwarz: The New Favourites Of Brinsley Schwarz

BRINSLEY SCHWARZ: THE NEW FAVOURITES OF BRINSLEY SCHWARZ (1974)

1) (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding?; 2) Ever Since You're Gone; 3) The Ugly Things; 4) I Got The Real Thing; 5) The Look That's In Your Eye Tonight; 6) Now's The Time; 7) Small Town, Big City; 8) Trying To Live My Life Without You; 9) I Like You, I Don't Love You; 10) Down In The Dive.

For their last album, Brinsley Schwarz turned to Dave Edmunds, already a minor celebrity in his own right, an avid lover of early pre-Beatles rock'n'roll who would as much want to impose that love on others as dwell in it himself — and indeed, The New Favourites should have rather been titled The New Old Favourites, since it just might be the single most retro-oriented Brinsley Schwarz album there ever was.

It does begin with what is arguably Nick Lowe's most famous song — the catchy pop anthem in support of idealistic ideals that would, however, only truly catch on in the popular conscience with the Elvis Costello cover several years later (and then be cemented even later with the version from the Bodyguard soundtrack, but we will try to erase that from the record). You could argue that this song, too, is «retro» in a way — advocating for a fallback from decadence and cynicism to the naïve, but noble (if also somewhat mythical) sentiments of the previous decade — but mu­sically, it should probably be described as «power pop», punchy, muscular, employing the three-chord punch of ʽBaba O'Rileyʼ (to weaker effect, though), and quite modern for 1974. It's not a great song in terms of composition, but Lowe makes an excellent, passionate vocal run towards the chorus resolution, and at the very least, comes across as a convincing spokesman for the cause — no wonder the song was endorsed for the Vote For Change tour in 2004 (even if the election results that year ultimately showed that something really was very funny about peace, love, and under­standing, but that's really beyond the point...).

Nothing else on the album, however, even begins to approach the anthemic fire of that song: all the other songs are quite down-homey, humble, and formulaic in comparison. Symbolically, one of the record's two covers is ʽNow's The Timeʼ, a very early, very simple and naïve pop song by The Hollies — not a songwriting gem like ʽBus Stopʼ or ʽKing Midas In Reverseʼ, but a generic early Merseybeat-style ditty that the Schwarzes perform with their usual diligence, yet how could they ever beat the Hollies' harmonies — their only serious advantage as of 1963, and one which still makes these early ditties outstandingly enjoyable, as opposed to this immediately forgettable cover? The second cover, by the way, is much more recent — Otis Clay's ʽTrying To Live My Life Without Youʼ, but, again, it is not clear how the band can improve on the song or make it more interesting in at least some respect.

Most of the «originals» also turn out to be pastiches and imitations — like ʽSmall Town, Big Cityʼ, which is essentially ʽAlley Oopʼ with new lyrics — and it looks like the band is not even trying to cover that up; maybe Edmunds was the one who convinced them that «good bands bor­row, great bands steal», but they got the causation wrong — it's not «if you steal, you're a great band», it's «if you're a great band, you steal», and because of this, here we have a good band stea­ling, which is embarrassing. I am not 100% sure that each and every one of these chord progres­sions had already been used in some pop / rock / country song in the 1950s/1960s, largely be­cause my memory is not vast enough to stockpile all those chord progressions, but it does honest­ly feel like this is the case, and then the idea of Brinsley Schwarz as the Stray Cats of the 1970s or something like that just doesn't seem so hot — except for the tactical idea of preserving the pleasures and vibes of pre-Beatles entertainment in the mid-1970s, which has been inevitably obsolete since, well, the mid-1970s, there is nothing about this music that elevates it above «listenable if you are ever forced to listen to it, so cross it off the Guantanamo list».

Since Brinsley Schwarz disbanded in 1975, The New Favourites could be regarded as one last bluff, undertaken to revitalize their image — and I am not saying it could not have worked, be­cause a large part of the world, fed up with progressive, glam, and Californian soft-rock, might have welcomed a retro-twist like this, were it properly presented. But this was a weak band from the very beginning, and even the addition of a dedicated producer could not have made it any stronger. Besides, the presence here of ʽPeace, Love, And Understandingʼ shows that Lowe could write passionate and powerful songs, at least occasionally — the logical question then being, why couldn't they write any more like that, instead of focusing on low-key secondhand stuff. Perhaps they didn't want to, because low-key secondhand stuff was what they really liked — in which case, well, they arguably got what they deserved.

Brinsley Schwarz: Please Don't Ever Change

BRINSLEY SCHWARZ: PLEASE DON'T EVER CHANGE (1973)

1) Hooked On Love; 2) Why Do We Hurt The One We Love; 3) I Worry ('Bout You Baby); 4) Don't Ever Change; 5) Home In My Land; 6) Play That Fast Thing (One More Time); 7) I Won't Make It Without You; 8) Down In Mexico; 9) Speedoo; 10) The Version (Hypocrite).

Apparently, this is a «stop-gap» album, thrown out on the market to appease the fans (but how many fans?) while waiting for the boys to write and record a proper set of new tunes — which explains its very lightweight nature, even judging by Brinsley Schwarz's usual standards. But even so, its title is symbolic: formally, it is simply the title of an old Goffin/King song that they are covering here, but allegorically, it reflects the band's ever-growing ideology of «if it ain't broke, don't fix it» — which this album is all about, from head to toe.

Be it as it may, this time around Nick Lowe and Co. are not even trying to imitate The Band — or, if they are, they are inadvertently imitating The Band's Moondog Matinee (inadvertently, be­cause both records happened to be released at the exact same time, October 1973). Then again, if you throw in Bowie's Pin Ups, 1973 was probably the first year of massive nostalgia for pop mu­sic of the previous decades (and then we'd also have to mention American Graffiti, and then there is simply no stopping...), so no wonder that Please Don't Ever Change is filled to the brim with Fifties- and Sixties-sounding soul, R&B, doo-wop, Latin, rockabilly, ska, and New Orleanian music. The only difference being is that most of these songs are not covers, but Nick Lowe (and Ian Gomm) originals, but other than the lyrics and the arrangements, little about these «originals» is «original» in the proper sense of the word.

Since this is Brinsley Schwarz we are talking about, this implies that the sound will be professio­nal and clean, the «show-off factor» will be less than zero, the atmosphere will be light, homely, and pleasant, and the memory of the album will probably wear off you in 24 hours if no more music is listened to, and in much less than that if you aurally compare this stuff to whatever, say, Genesis, The Who, or even The Faces were doing that same year. Some of the songs are just total novelties (or, rather, «oldities») here, with no individual reasons to exist — ʽDown In Mexicoʼ is not a cover of the hilarious old Coasters number, but an «original» Latin serenade pastiche, which the band is unable to play better than your average Mexican band and, what is worse, is also unable to render distinctly «Brinsley Schwarz-ian», whatever that could mean; and their take on ska is either limp and devoid of energy (in between ʽWhy Do We Hurt The One We Loveʼ and ʽWrong 'Em Boyoʼ, I know which one I'd choose in a jiffy), or simply puzzling (what is that in­strumental cover of Leroy Sibbles doing there in the first place?).

With the blues, these guys are in more familiar and comfortable territory, and soulful numbers like ʽI Worryʼ and ʽI Won't Make It Without Youʼ, whose spiritual ancestors include B. B. King, Sam Cooke, and Fats Domino, among other people, are smooth and touching, though I would not know what else to say. Somewhat more exciting is the live version of ʽHome In My Handʼ from the previous album, with a nice jamming section where Brinsley and Ian heat up the hall with nasty riffs and hysterical solos (think of the little brother of Marc Bolan on rhythm guitar and the little brother of Alvin Lee on lead, though both clearly have a long way to go). But on the whole, even here there is not much to say — just tap your toes and be happy, and please don't ever change, because, you know, we like you just the way you are. (At least they do this song better than the Beatles did it on the BBC — but fortunately for Brinsley, the Beatles never tried to re­cord it in a regular studio session). 

Brinsley Schwarz: Nervous On The Road

BRINSLEY SCHWARZ: NERVOUS ON THE ROAD (1972)

1) It's Been So Long; 2) Happy Doing What We're Doing; 3) Surrender To The Rhythm; 4) Don't Lose Your Grip On Love; 5) Nervous On The Road; 6) Feel A Little Funky; 7) I Like It Like That; 8) Brand New You, Brand New Me; 9) Home In My Hand; 10) Why, Why, Why, Why, Why.

Hey hey, now this is what I call pub rock! Same year — two completely different worlds. All of a sudden, Brinsley Schwarz are no longer a homebrewn pale copy of «The Band trying to sound like Van Morrison», but a vivacious outfit whose songs make you want to dance, frolick, have a good time in general — with a sentimental ballad or two in the works, but nothing that would pretend at soulful depth and fail (and somehow, «failures of the deep» always produce a more mi­serable effect than «failures of the shallow» — it's like losing $2,000 at poker compared to losing $20 at poker). The songwriting does not get noticeably better, but it gets more adequate, and this arguably makes Nervous On The Road into the definitive Brinsley Schwarz album.

This time, Ian Gomm writes only one song; with the addition of two external covers, this once again leaves Nick Lowe as the principal songwriter, contributing seven new numbers. However, it also feels like Bob Andrews has been pushed to the foreground, and his seemingly relaxed, but really quite disciplined and colorful playing helps drag many of the songs from mediocrity — starting early on with Gomm's only contribution, another so-so Buddy Holly imitation (ʽIt's Been So Longʼ) which, however, has such delicious, light-Mozartian piano flourishes accompanying the main guitar melody as the original Crickets could have never thought of. And then on Lowe's ʽHappy Doing What We're Doingʼ, a quintessential «pub-rocker» if there ever was one, Andrews' organ and piano overdubs also steal the spotlight from everyone else — and then it becomes the regular pattern: Nervous On The Road is a record for piano lovers, not guitar fans.

That detail aside, the record is what Exile On Main St. might have sounded like with much cleaner production, much weaker songwriting, fewer gospel/soul ambitions, and no traces of sleaze, grease, and grit whatsoever. The «politeness» of Brinsley Schwarz becomes especially visible on their cover of ʽI Like It Like Thatʼ, a song that sounded more «dirty» and «raw» when it was performed by The Dave Clark Five, of all people — this version, with soft, playful vocals, a crystal clean guitar solo, and a totally tame rhythm section, suggests that they probably serve nothing but goat's milk at the place called ʽI Like It Like Thatʼ. But just because the tempos have been sped up and the soulfulness has been replaced by friendly low-key entertainment, this polite­ness does not always result in boredom.

The faster rockers, such as the title track (where Nick tries to emulate the Lou Reed vibe a bit) and the Ronnie Self cover ʽHome In My Handʼ, done here as a one-chord boogie, are hardly a match for the Stones or even the Faces, but technically, they got a great mix, with perfect separa­tion between guitars, keyboards, and vocals, and this is probably just exactly how it's gotta be done if you can't make yourself sound «really special». Things get a little more suspicious when they go for a very low-key, subdued road-blues vibe (ʽFeel A Little Funkyʼ) with guitars and keyboards going for a jazzier, loungier style, but Andrews is on such a roll that I can even stand his bit of Amos Milburn impersonation. And even the album's only reminder of the band's love for the «soulful roots-rock» of The Band and Jackson Browne, ʽDon't Lose Your Grip On Loveʼ, might be their best contribution in this genre — some harrowing vocal twists, a catchy chorus, a piano line copped and well-adapted from ʽThe Weightʼ, it's all enjoyable.

Most importantly, they do sound like they're finally ʽHappy Doing What We're Doingʼ, if only for a brief while — even when the music remains derivative, this lowering of ambitions helps the band achieve better coordination and just have more fun in each other's presence. They may be Nervous On The Road all right, but in the studio they feel quite relaxed and amicable, and the record exudes this hard-to-describe homely charm that every soft-rock record aspires to, but not every soft-rock record actually achieves. With all due reservations, and with the understanding that this is still hardly an album that I might find myself voluntarily coming back to, I still give it a moderate thumbs up — mainly because it provides such a refreshing contrast with everything that preceded it.

Brinsley Schwarz: Silver Pistol

BRINSLEY SCHWARZ: SILVER PISTOL (1972)

1) Merry Go Round; 2) One More Day; 3) Nightingale; 4) Silver Pistol; 5) The Last Time I Was Fooled; 6) Un­known Number; 7) Range War; 8) Egypt; 9) Niki Hoeke Speedway; 10) Ju Ju Man; 11) Rockin' Chair.

This is where the Brinsley Schwarz formula undergoes the last cosmetic modifications... and turns out to be a very polite, accurate, and somewhat tepid formula after all. The songs are shor­tened, cleaned up, straightened out, and made to completely conform to the standards of folk- and country-rock, with no «progressive» ambitions whatsoever, and nary a hint of hard rocking, either. So this time around you will never once confuse this band with early Yes or late Steppenwolf, much as you'd want to. However, you might perhaps confuse it with Wildlife-era Mott The Hoople, and probably with several dozen other bands that had this sort of sound at the time — Byrds-Band-style roots-rock, but without the uniquely expressive features of either of these bands, and without a whole lot of impressive songwriting, either.

New member, bass and rhythm guitar player Ian Gomm, steps in here as a supporting songwriter, getting credits for four songs (Nick Lowe has six), and there are also two covers of American singer-songwriter Jim Ford, largely unknown but, apparently, hugely favored by Bobby Womack, who would record a shitload of songs of his for The Poet and The Poet II later on. The Jim Ford covers are actually distinctive — they are the two songs at the end of the album that display the highest energy level: ʽNiki Hoeke Speedwayʼ is a loose, drunk-sounding blues-rocker, and ʽJu Ju Manʼ is an uptempo boogie piece that, in this rendition, kicks about as much ass as the Grateful Dead when they were playing rock'n'roll. Which is not that much, as you could guess, but for those who like their rock'n'roll at low chamber temperatures, very stylish and tasteful.

Unfortunately, there is very little I can find to say about these songs, and what little I can find will not be flattering. As much as I respect Nick Lowe's songwriting in theory, let's face it, it is just a wee bit embarrassing when you realize that one of the most memorable tunes on the album, so humbly titled ʽUnknown Numberʼ, is only memorable because it is built on a joint piano/guitar riff that completely nicks (nick-lowes?) the melodic line from Buddy Holly's ʽWords Of Loveʼ — and adds nothing of serious value on top of it, so I guess the only reason Buddy's estate did not sue is that either nobody knew who Nick Lowe was, or they knew they wouldn't get much out of these guys anyway. In any case, this is just not a good sign.

The album's centerpiece is ʽEgyptʼ, a long, slow, meditative ballad whose point is made perfectly clear in the first thirty seconds or so — still it drags on for more than five minutes, with Bob An­drews' solemn wintery organ lines and Lowe's tender vocals sustaining the atmosphere. Some will find this deep and romantic, but it annoys me how manneristic the whole thing is — they're handling the procedure with such exaggeratedly exquisite finesse, you'd think they were afraid that just a little more strain and the entire studio would crumble around them. It's so goddamn quiet that, in fact, that at the beginning of the third minute you can actually hear a dog barking somewhere near the studio — I have no details, but I'm 99% sure it was just an accident that they decided to leave in, and good thing they did, because it's probably the best bit in the song.

The new songwriter apparently still takes his cues from Nick, because his contributions are large­ly just the same relaxed, generic country-rock — pleasant, but mellow and with little in the way of individualistically-rememberable melody. A typical example is the last track — the instrumen­tal ʽRockin' Chairʼ, which would fit nicely in any average country-western soundtrack, but when I really need my share of such music, as in, for a spiritual uplift or something, I can always have the Allman Brothers' ʽJessicaʼ instead. That's Ian Gomm for you. And Nick Lowe? I actually like ʽMerry Go Roundʼ a decade later when its verse melody was remade as ʽManic Mondayʼ and its chorus melody was made completely anew.

You get the point by now — Silver Pistol sounds very nice, and it may even be the best country-rock (soft-rock? whatever) album produced by a UK band in 1972, but in that range, they did not have that much competition, did they? Well, some; pop music historians will most likely be able to find far more blatantly rotten examples. The sad truth, I believe, is that the band was still way too much dominated by its rootsy American influences to develop their own style — and if they did not want to take a lesson from the dirty ugly Rolling Stones, well, by 1972 you had the Kinks and Muswell Hillbillies to show you just the right way of merging American and British tradi­tions. As it is, contrastive perception forces another thumbs down. 

Brinsley Schwarz: Despite It All

BRINSLEY SCHWARZ: DESPITE IT ALL (1970)

1) Country Girl; 2) The Slow One; 3) Funk Angel; 4) Piece Of Home; 5) Love Song; 6) Starship; 7) Ebury Down; 8) Old Jarrow.

Hey hey, pack up the mules and ride out west — on their second album, Brinsley Schwarz seem to have caught the country flu head-on, even if they also continue to be influenced by Van Mor­rison along the way. The main units of adoration, though, are by now firmly on the other side of the Atlantic: The Byrds, The Burritos, and The Band are all carefully studied as textbook material and, if possible, strictly imitated. Thus, already the album opener, ʽCountry Girlʼ, is a fun, sweet, innocent little bopper, but 100% derivable from ʽYou Ain't Going Nowhereʼ, except that, of course, lyrics like "I want to go where my country girl goes / Back where my green-grass roots are growing" are just way too flat as an allegory when compared to "Genghis Khan, he couldn't keep / All his men supplied with sleep", and the collective group harmonies of Brinsley Schwarz do not even begin to compete with the lonesome timbre of Roger McGuinn. Nice fiddle part from guest star Willy Weider, though. Really countryesque and all.

Everything else, too, sounds and feels strictly like a bunch of genre exercises: despite having written all but one of these songs, Nick Lowe hardly seems to have any serious connection with the material, so that something like ʽLove Songʼ, a very straightforward soft-rocker, simply states that "this here is a love song, I gotta get back to my baby's heart again", rather than sets out to prove it in some sense-perturbing manner. All I know is, if I were Nick Lowe's baby, he wouldn't even get back to my front porch with this barely tepid carcass of a song. Or take ʽStarshipʼ — theoretically, a likeable country waltz, but not half an inch different from a million generic coun­try waltzes. So... uh... they can keep up the tempo, and they have a pretty slide guitar tone. Does that rate a B+, or an A- on the regular Nashville curriculum?

I would say that the only song on this album where they are trying at least a bit is ʽOld Jarrowʼ, the closing seven-minute country-rock epic where the country instrumentation is continually spiced up with sharp, high-pitched lead guitar parts. The lyrics (as you can see from the song title) have nothing to do with country-western themes, and the song just uses a country setting to even­tually explode into a really fierce barrage of guitar-hero soloing (although for contemporary guitar heroics, that tone is still impossibly thin — Marc Bolan or Mick Ronson would have eaten these guys alive). A respectable attempt that still fails to justify its running length, let alone sal­vage the album as a whole.

Another thumbs down here, as the apprenticeship period of Brinsley Schwarz enters yet another phase — the most fascinating thing about it all being that, you know, Capitol Records were still willing to back them for this one. Today, they would probably have shipped them straight away to songwriting school, under the tutorship of Max Martin. No, wait, for this line of work, Kelly Clarkson, probably.

Brinsley Schwarz: Brinsley Schwarz

BRINSLEY SCHWARZ: BRINSLEY SCHWARZ (1970)

1) Hymn To Me; 2) Shining Brightly; 3) Rock And Roll Women; 4) Lady Constant; 5) What Do You Suggest; 6) Mayfly; 7) Ballad Of A Hasbeen Beauty Queen.

I like it how the band was named «Brinsley Schwarz», even if all the songs were actually written by Nick Lowe. But, to be fair, «Nick Lowe» sounds far less cool than «Brinsley Schwarz»; in fact, I don't even think that anybody's first reaction to the name of the band would be «oh, that's pro­bably the name of one of the guys in the band», because there's just no way in hell that any single living person could have a name like «Brinsley Schwarz». Of course, guitarist Brinsley Schwarz had exactly that name, which makes it all the more exciting, and in 1965, he had formed a band called Kippington Lodge, which made the phrase «Hello, I'm Brinsley Schwarz from Kipping­ton Lodge» the coolest thing on Earth since any number of lines from select Dickens novels. After the band's first singles flopped, though (they were written in the regular Britpop style after the Kinks and the Small Faces, and did not manage to be distinctive enough), Kippington Lodge was abandoned in favor of something more ambitious and less overtly English — and, after all, Schwarz is not much of an English family name, anyway.

Most people are introduced to Brinsley Schwarz by means of the label «pub rock», which was attached to them around 1971 and never really meant much of anything other than playing in pubs rather than large entertainment venues. Personally, I have always misunderstood «pub rock» as something down-to-earth, rowdy, and bawdy — anything from ʽHonky Tonk Womenʼ to Slade and Geordie — but even if you reject that definition and go along with just the «small scale» aspects of pub rock, it is still hard to view Brinsley Schwarz's debut album as anything of the kind, since it is clearly a very ambitious, if not a very successful, project.

In a nutshell, Brinsley Schwarz tries to combine country, folk, and «progressive» influences from both sides of the Atlantic — like a softer, smoother, subtler version of Traffic, largely avoiding that band's blues, rock, and R&B roots while still trying to hover in the air several feet above the label of «easy listening». They have this laid back, clean, professional, intelligent, if not all that exciting, sound going on, and sometimes they actually even manage to sound like early Yes — mainly on ʽLady Constantʼ, the first of the album's two epic pieces. At other times they manage to sound almost exactly like Crosby, Stills & Nash, which isn't actually that surpri­sing if you remember that early Yes covered the Byrds' ʽI See Youʼ and that the distance between American folk- and country-rock and early British progressive rock actually used to be much smaller than its subsequent Tarkus-ization would lead us to believe.

This is all interesting in theory, but in the boiling-bubbling musical explosion of 1969-70 Brin­sley Schwarz were not the only player in this game, and as nice as this album is, the songs just do not make that much of an impression. The band's harmony singing is pretty and sometimes down­right angelic, but hardly exclusive, and both The Byrds and CS&N were there before. The hooks on the shorter songs are about as strong as on the average Traffic songs — variations on roots-rock themes with little emotional depth, since both the playing and the singing are usually kept in check and restrained (the fastest and most energetic song on the album, ʽMayflyʼ, is still played as if they were afraid to wake up the neighbors or something). And, worst of all, there is hardly any distinct personality behind the songs and the album in general — you can tell that they're really trying, but it is much harder to tell what they're trying or why they're trying it. The simple answer that they just like «soft rock» is no more going to cut it than if they just liked hard rock. I did spend some time trying to locate that one special angle, but no dice.

Actually, I do not want to put this record way too down, but it is hard to find kind words for pseudo-epic stuff like ʽBallad Of A Hasbeen Beauty Queenʼ, which simply has no reason to exist in a world that already has Van Morrison in it. After a brief and boring hard rock intro (for a change), the thing becomes a slow country-rock shuffle that tries to be psychologically deep and aims for a musical crescendo, but all they really have at their disposal is an organ player and a lead guitarist who are either too afraid or too shy to let their hair down, spending fruitless minutes trying out generic lead lines and finally just turning up the volume for the last «climactic» verse of the song. And the singer? Nick Lowe has a pleasant, intelligent tone when he is humming under his nose, and an ugly way of nasal screaming when he is going «all out», and by the time the climax has, you know, climaxed, he still has not convinced me that he just managed to tell me something important, deserving of ten minutes of my time.

In the end, it all boils down to a few nicely shaped country-pop(-rock?) tunes like ʽShining Brightlyʼ and a few moments when the sunny-day-laziness of the tune can actually seem like cynical wisdom (ʽRock And Roll Womenʼ). But only somebody who, incidentally, feels really tired of the insane, aggressive musical dynamics of the late Sixties / early Seventies could pro­bably «love» this album — and even when I get those inclinations myself, I'd still rather take some guy who is very deliberate about getting away from all the hullabaloo, like J. J. Cale, over this half-hearted attempt to be «humble» and «progressive» at the same time, where the two ten­dencies just outcancel themselves rather than complement each other.

Thumbs down, then, if not necessarily accompanied with any hard feelings. Ironically, this is probably the same decision here that was made by contemporary British critics — some of whom felt themselves pressured by the so-called «Brinsley Schwarz Hype», instigated by their manager Dave Robinson, a good example of why it is fruitless to seek direct correlation between publicity and critical / public recognition, bypassing real musical merit. Fortunately for us, this was not the end for Brinsley Schwarz: in retrospect, their career, curve-wise, is somewhat similar to their contemporaries Mott The Hoople, who also began with a «promising failure» of a self-titled al­bum around that same time, yet ultimately managed to find themselves at a later date.