The 5th Dimension: The Age Of Aquarius

THE 5TH DIMENSION: THE AGE OF AQUARIUS (1969)

1) Aquarius / Let The Sunshine In; 2) Blowing Away; 3) Skinny Man; 4) Wedding Bell Blues; 5) Don'tcha Hear Me Callin' To Ya; 6) The Hideaway; 7) Workin' On A Groovy Thing; 8) Let It Be Me; 9) Sunshine Of Your Love; 10) The Winds Of Heaven; 11) Those Were The Days; 12) Let The Sunshine In (reprise).

If there was at least one good influence that Hair made on the musical world (outside of its social impact — making parents finally shed a tear for their hippie kids and all), it came in the form of a serious improvement of The 5th Dimension's fourth album over their third one. Not that anybody really gives a damn in 2017, but, on the other hand, the band's cover of ʽAquarius / Let The Sun­shine Inʼ is pretty much the only thing that the average customer these days might remember about the band in general, so at least there's that. Obviously, Hair and The 5th Dimension were made for each other, and here, the band commits to the experience one hundred percent, with soaring vocal harmonies and brass fanfares blaring Ennio Morricone out of the sky, while Billy Davis Jr. pulls his finest son-of-a-preacher-man impression on the ad-libbed part of ʽLet The Sunshine Inʼ — with an energy level easily matching that of Otis Redding (in fact, it would not be impossible to mistake him for Otis on this one).

If it were just the single, though, we'd have to count it as a fluke; surprisingly, the entire album is significantly more consistent than Stoned Soul Picnic, which probably had to do with the band and Bones Howe retaining the best of their songwriters and firing the worst ones (yes, we're sort of looking at you, Jeff Comanor). The best remains the best: there are two more Laura Nyro songs here, brilliantly sung by the band's female vocalists — ʽBlowing Awayʼ is upbeat soul-pop at its catchiest, funnest, and most powerful, while ʽWedding Bell Bluesʼ mixes that upbeatness and melodic optimism with a streak of sadness and yearning (it is, after all, about a girl losing hope of ever getting married), and Marilyn McCoo's vocals on both songs do full justice to Laura's originals (Marilyn is clearly more powerful and disciplined than Nyro, but that does not mean these are just technical, soulless renditions — she clearly understands Laura's messages, and is as perfect and loyal an interpreter as Laura could ever get).

Predictably, they are less successful when tackling genres they don't really know what to do with: while Cream's ʽSunshine Of Your Loveʼ cannot lose all of its sexy menace as long as the main riff stays relatively intact, it is obvious that the only thing this band and this production team can do with it is water it down — which they do, with happy harmonies, more of those brass fanfares, and a silly conga-driven break in the place of Clapton's solo. It made even less sense to put it near a bombastic, Vegas-style arrangement of ʽLet It Be Meʼ (I wonder if Billy Davis Jr. had to wear a rhinestone suit in the studio to properly get into character?), though, perhaps, not as little sense as ending the album with a cover of a cover of a cover — it was not enough that Mary Hopkin got herself a hit with ʽThose Were The Daysʼ after Gene Raskin had converted it from an old Russian gypsy-themed romance, no, the song also had to get a 5th Dimension seal on it (then again, it's personal here, since I hate stereotypical Russian romances and drinking songs with the same pas­sion that is usually reserved for intellectual Yankees hating stereotypical country music).

Still, misfires aside, there's a surprisingly large number of cool tunes here even beyond the title track and the Nyro covers. Michael and Ginger Kollander's ʽSkinny Manʼ is a chunk of charming bubblegum pop with intricate call-and-answer vocals between the boys and the girls in the band. Rudy Stevenson's ʽDont'cha Hear Me Callin' To Yaʼ has a tense, resolute Latin groove (stylisti­cally similar to Santana's ʽEvil Waysʼ, even though that song had not yet been released at the time). The only (but obligatory) Jimmy Webb cover, ʽThe Hideawayʼ, is a Randy Newmanesque Tin Pan Alley-ish family pop number that avoids Jimmy's sentimental excesses, even if its vocal hooks leave something to be desired. And as much as I am supposed to despise Neil Sedaka, I cannot deny that ʽWorkin' On A Groovy Thingʼ is a really well-written pop song, even despite sharing the subliminal message of rejecting intercourse before marriage ("let's not rush it, we'll take it slow" — yeah right, how about singing this with special guest Grace Slick on parallel lead vocals for extra sincerity?).

Subsequently, even if there are no signs whatsoever here that the band was somehow aware of changing musical fashions circa 1969 (and maybe that's a good thing — imagine Bones Howe trying to pull a Jimi Hendrix or a Led Zeppelin on us!), at least The Age Of Aquarius could not help but get pulled into the overall mega-healthy vortex of whatever was going on, when even thoroughly commercial songwriters, about as rebellious in nature as the local tax inspector, some­times produced musically challenging and tasteful material. Oh well, just a very good year on the whole, and for The 5th Dimension in particular — thumbs up, with the usual minimal reserva­tions here and there.

Champion Jack Dupree: Vol. 4 (1951-1953)

CHAMPION JACK DUPREE: VOL. 4: 1951-1953 (2009)

1) Deacon's Party; 2) My Baby's Comin' Back Home; 3) Just Plain Tired; 4) I'm Gonna Find You Someday; 5) Goin' Back To Louisiana; 6) Barrel House Mama; 7) Old, Old Woman; 8) Mean Black Snake; 9) The Woman I Love; 10) All Night Party; 11) Heart Breaking Woman; 12) Watchin' My Stuff; 13) Ragged And Hungry; 14) Somebody Changed The Lock; 15) Stumbling Block Blues; 16) Highway Blues; 17) Shake Baby Shake; 18) Number Nine Blues; 19) Drunk Again; 20) Shim Sham Shimmy; 21) Ain't No Meat On De Bone; 22) The Blues Got Me Rockin'; 23) Tongue Tied Blues; 24) Please Tell Me Baby; 25) Walkin' Upside Your Head; 26) Rub A Little Boogie; 27) Camille.

The final volume in the series traces our Champion's adventures in the early Fifties, with at least four different small-size labels in New York City (Apollo, Gotham, King, Red Robin), each of which wasted no time in dropping the Champ after two or three tenaciously commercially un­successful singles — released under at least five different band names and pseudonyms (in­cluding «Big Chief Ellis & His Blues Stars», «Meat Head Johnson & His Blues Hounds», and «Lightning Junior & The Empires»), before finally giving it up and returning to using his original moniker for two sessions in 1953.

Now one might indeed argue that the lack of success was due to New York's general lack of interest in the blues at the time (jazz was really where it was at), but then again, let's admit it, all these sides that Dupree cut at the time weren't exactly the epitome of notability or originality, even though, with Brownie McGhee at his side for most of these sessions, Dupree had a good guitar backing, and on some of these tracks, they are also joined by Brownie's younger brother, Stick, the guy who, some say, was single-handedly responsible for inventing rock'n'roll with his classic recor­ding of ʽDrinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Deeʼ back in 1947.

As «Meat Head Johnson & His Blues Hounds», they almost came close to replicating that sound with ʽOld, Old Womanʼ, where, at the beginning, you will be hearing some angry distorted guitar chords coming right out of the (future!) Keith Richards chordbook; and it gets even better on ʽShake Baby Shakeʼ from 1953, with both Brownie and Stick on guitars and the Champ laying on a groove that would, of course, only three years later morph into the classic ʽWhole Lotta Shakin' Going Onʼ groove of Jerry Lee Lewis. If only the Champion could show the same punch that the Killer would show... but the days of true rock'n'roll wildness were still ahead, and these cats had to show some decorum, because even with all of New Yorkish tolerance towards black musicians, politeness in playing dance music was still a necessary prerequisite for not being run out of town. Still, there's as much rock'n'roll drive in these tracks here as you could only wish for 1953. Also, ʽShim Sham Shimmyʼ totally rules, with a bombastic drum beat, guitar more distorted than on any given Chuck Berry tune, and cool jazz-boogie runs from Stick that totally presage Alvin Lee of Ten Years After in tone and style, if not in flash.

Still, the majority of these tracks is not proto-rock'n'roll, but slow 12-bar blues, and here, there is nothing more to add unless you really want to start analyzing the lyrics — some of which are quite interesting from the point of historical studies in the evolution of political correctness (ʽTongue Tied Bluesʼ), or from the point of folkloristic studies of the evolution of text (the song that we usually know as ʽLouiseʼ, because this is the name under which it crossed the Atlantic and fell in the hands of The Yardbirds and others, is here called ʽCamilleʼ... come to think of it, the only words it shares with ʽLouiseʼ are in the chorus, but the chorus coincides completely). Also, if I am not mistaken, ʽAin't No Meat On De Boneʼ has a New Orleanian, Mardi Gras-like carnivalesque groove to it (think Professor Longhair), which makes it somewhat of an oddity in the Champion's New York-era material.

Bottomline is, none of this material ever sold much, despite a few of the tracks truly being on the cutting edge of the rock'n'roll movement for 1951-53, but you just gotta admire the guy's tena­ciousness — he eventually spent almost fifteen years on the fringes of New York's musical life, jumping from label to label and making a living by any means he could. It was, in fact, nothing short of amazing that despite all his shortcomings, he was eventually able of securing himself a short-lived contract with no less than Atlantic Records themselves around 1959 (perhaps through the Stick McGhee connection?), at which point we end the story of this 4-CD package and move on to the next exciting (or not so exciting) chapter in the life of the Champion.

The Rolling Stones: Dirty Work

THE ROLLING STONES: DIRTY WORK (1986)

1) One Hit (To The Body); 2) Fight; 3) Harlem Shuffle; 4) Hold Back; 5) Too Rude; 6) Winning Ugly; 7) Back To Zero; 8) Dirty Work; 9) Had It With You; 10) Sleep Tonight.

It is not disputable that the overall state of the band in the mid-Eighties was quite pitiful: not only were the personal relations between Mick and Keith reaching an absolute nadir, with Mick's egotism and Keith's conservatism getting the better of them, but then there was also the problem with Charlie Watts, a notorious slowpoke whose alcohol and drug problems finally caught up with him a whole decade after Keith's crisis. Even Wyman seemed to find more comfort pro­ducing movie soundtracks in that era than working with the Stones.

Now the Stones are known as a band that often seemed to work better in a time of crisis, capable of channelling their agitation, confusion, and tension into music — think back to 1967 or to 1972 for some classic examples. Unfortunately, their worst crisis (worst, because its main reasons were internal rather than external) took place not in 1967 and not in 1972, but in 1985-86, some of the least auspicious years, to put it mildly, for Sixties' and Seventies' veteran rockers in general; and although you'd have to be deaf and dumb not to notice all that tension reflected in the sounds of Dirty Work, this time around it does not help the music, it only makes matters more obnoxious. There is no tricking the hand of fate — it was 1986, and it was the Stones' destiny to come up with their crappiest artistic statement of all time.

What is wrong with this record? Well — almost everything. To produce it, they brought in one of the biggest stars of Eighties' production, Steve Lillywhite, whose impressive resume already in­cluded Peter Gabriel's classic third album and the first three albums by U2; incidentally, he also happens to be the guy often credited with pioneering the gated reverb drum effect (which, predic­tably, is used a-plenty on this album). The problem is, what worked fine and dandy for the new styles of music developed by Gabriel and U2 could hardly be expected to work for old school rockers like the Stones — and it doesn't: the combination of glossy, plastic production with tradi­tional rock'n'roll values pretty much wastes the gloss and discredits the rock'n'roll. This was already a big problem with Undercover, but here modern production values are applied far more systematically, and the constant use of reverb and echo gets obnoxious very quickly.

Stiff production would still be a minor nuisance, though, had the songwriting and playing been kept on the level — which they are not. Ronnie Wood is credited as co-writer on a whopping four tracks here, which is already suspicious, seeing how reluctant Mick and Keith had always been to share the songwriting credits with anybody else; this is essentially a sign of their not giving a damn whatsoever (for the record, ever since the 1989 comeback, poor Ronnie never got a single other songwriting credit). Even more ridiculously, ʽBack To Zeroʼ is co-credited to their guest piano player, Chuck Leavell — did the late Ian Stewart or the great Nicky Hopkins ever get even one credit on some of those tracks that would never work so well without their participation?.. Throw in two covers, and you can see how much of a mess the record really was.

But hey, perhaps, against all odds, some of these songs could turn out to be masterpieces? Well, miracles did not happen in 1986. A few of them rank among the worst piles of sonic shit ever committed to tape in the name of the Rolling Stones — including both conventional rockers and songs outside of the band's typical range. For instance, ʽHold Backʼ almost manages to sound like a contemporary hair metal anthem — big fat sound with a shapeless, meaningless riff and the entire song dominated by headache-inducing drum bombast and an endless stream of tuneless barking from Mick «Turpentine Butt» Jagger (which, by the way, is also a common problem with the record: the only style for Mick to sing in here is gurgle and bark, bark and gurgle, as if he wanted to compete in monotony with some bona fide hardcore punk outfit). ʽFightʼ, true to its title, is not nearly as shapeless as to what concerns the verses and choruses, but otherwise shares all the problems of ʽHold Backʼ — no good riff, no good vocal melody, and no true Stonesy dynamics to the playing.

With the non-rockers, the situation does not get any better: there are no well-made funky sur­prises like ʽToo Much Bloodʼ here. Instead, you have ʽBack To Zeroʼ, a messy dance-pop number that finds the band genuinely struggling to find a coordinated groove — one big reason behind this, perhaps, is that, according to most accounts, the band almost never really played as a band in the studio at the time, with individual members laying on their contributions one by one, a process that could work with Paul McCartney but never really with the Stones. (At least, never since the creative peak of the late Sixties, when Keith alone could work magic with his guitar overdub layers). Meanwhile, Keith gets re-engaged with his passion for reggae, producing a piss-poor version of Half Pint's 1983 hit ʽWinsomeʼ, retitled ʽToo Rudeʼ and overlaid with so much echo on everything that you get the feeling of standing on one side of a cave entrance while the band is getting it on on the other side. Sh-sh-sh-sh-shak-e-e-e! And pointless: who really needs to hear the Stones doing reggae?

A couple more of the rockers barely make it to the «mediocre» level due to slightly higher levels of tightness and catchiness (ʽWinning Uglyʼ; the ridiculously belated anti-capitalist rant of the title track), but on the whole, there are only three songs here that I would recommend salvaging for compilations — not surprisingly, two of these were chosen for single releases and were also the only ones temporarily resurrected for the 1989-90 touring program. ʽOne Hit (To The Body)ʼ, even with the stupid production and the barking vocals (here, they work though), is a good piece of ravaging rock'n'soul, again, with no decent riff to speak of, but at least a catchy chorus that does a good job of conveying the mixed love-and-pain emotion of love addiction. The most poignant bit about it, of course, is that the song's lyrics seemed to be more of an allegory for the love-and-hate relationship between the band's two members — as further confirmed by the half-hilarious, half-frightening pseudo-karate match between Mick and Keith in the accompanying video (no chainsaws this time, but Mr. Richards can get even spookier with a guitar). As a ques­tionable bonus, you can throw in a guest guitar solo from Mr. Jimmy Page himself — strange they didn't bring in Eddie Van Halen, who'd probably be even more suitable.

The same trick is also reprised on the far less known ʽHad It With Youʼ, which I have always held a soft spot for because of all the songs in here, it is the one that is least encumbered with bombastic production and, consequently, the most close one to reflect those good old col­lective Stones values. Apparently, Keith wrote the lyrics and Mick got to sing them, tacitly acknowled­ging the truth of lines like "You always seem to haunt me / Serving out injunctions / Shouting out instructions" and "You're a mean mistreater / You're a dirty dirty rat scum" — and putting his bark to good use on the pissed-off "I HAD it, HAD it, HAD it wich'ooo!" chorus. It is not a great song — it is simply a charming autobiographical moment, done in style, including, finally, a normal drum track from Charlie and a proper harmonica solo from Mick. Too bad they'd never dare perform this live in public, meaning that the song will forever dangle in obscurity, even though, in my mind, it deserves to be included in any comprehensive musical biography of The Rolling Stones.

Then, finally, there is their cover of ʽHarlem Shuffleʼ, a resuscitation of the old Bob & Earl hit from 1963 — probably just to see how well this «Lillywhite Stones» sound of 1986 could acco­­modate the old soul values from the young and innocent days. They made a good choice, because the bass-heavy original already had a shade of surprising darkness to it, which is here emphasized even further: the Stones' take lays it on even thicker in the bass department, and even the organ has a certain doom-laden atmosphere to it, so that most of the time it's not so much a ʽHarlem Shuffleʼ as it is a ʽHighway To Hellʼ (much less «happy fun» in spirit than the AC/DC song, for that matter). The good news is that the song was catchy from the beginning, and also that it is taken at a respectable mid-tempo rather than whipped up to crazy frenzy like most of the stuff here — and even Jagger's barking makes sense as he is playing a possessed figure with all those "whoah, whoah, whoah, I can't stand it no more!" Ironically, this is the tune that reveals the most psychological depth on the entire album — there's dancing as an allegory for the sex drive, and there's all those primal and hellish connotations for both, bringing back memories of how this band once used to set the tone in the art of on-the-brink temptation.

But are three songs enough to properly pull Dirty Work out of the Stones' asscrack where it has remained firmly wedged for thirty years now? I don't think so. Together with Emotional Rescue, these are the only two records in the band's catalog that, on the whole, have an offensive aura to me — even if they sound quite different from each other and offend in completely different ways. (Funny enough, both of them also end with an amorphous lullaby from Keith: ʽSleep Tonightʼ has a slightly more memorable chorus than ʽAll About Youʼ, mainly due to repetition, but overall is undistinguishable from the large pool of slow soul ballads written by the guy, not to mention just as poorly produced here as anything.) Simply put, with a few moments' exception, the band's heart was not clearly in this when they went ahead and did it — this is a record that never should have happened in the first place. Had Mick and Keith truly broken up for good after this, Dirty Work would have been a fairly pitiful way to end an illustrious career; as it happened, it ended up just being a time-marking embarrassment, a certified thumbs down record, only out there to prove the universal applicability of the term «mid-life crisis», even to superhumans, and to serve as yet another piece of strong evidence for the «mid-Eighties curse» from which not even Keith Richards was exempt. Perhaps if he'd still been on heroin though...

Agnes Obel: Citizen Of Glass

AGNES OBEL: CITIZEN OF GLASS (2016)

1) Stretch Your Eyes; 2) Familiar; 3) Red Virgin Soil; 4) It's Happening Again; 5) Stone; 6) Trojan Horses; 7) Citizen Of Glass; 8) Golden Green; 9) Grasshopper; 10) Mary.

At the very least, she deserves some credit here for finally deciding to branch out and diversify the formula. No major changes, that is, but at least this time around, it gets harder to confuse her with the average sentimental piano balladeer — if only because there's less piano around and more strings, as well as more variegated keyboards, a mix of acoustic (vibraphones, etc.) and old-fashioned electric stuff like the Mellotron and even the Trautonium, a real electronic relic hauled straight out of the 1930s. Apparently, this is the first instrument to be heard here, producing the odd siren wail in the intro to ʽStretch Your Eyesʼ and immediately setting an atmosphere of distant alarm — always distant, of course, because the protagonist of all of Obel's songs lives in a perfectly shielded bunker; as long as she confines herself to that place, she's perfectly safe from all the troubles above.

The title of the album apparently translates the German term gläserner bürger, and is used to define a (human) object of mass surveillance, but do not think that the lady goes into politics here, or into morbid ruminations on humanity's dystopian future (unless you really want to interpret a line like "we took a walk to the summit at night, you and I" as a documentary description of an imaginary meeting between Russian and American presidents). It is more of a hint at herself, I believe, and how she's got nothing to hide, a predictably irritating paradox in the light of the fact that she is still hiding everything that is possible to hide, because a straightforward interpretation of any of these songs remains out of the question.

The songs do get more complex in structure, and it gets harder to shoo any of them away as just another melancholic waltz — in fact, I suspect that somebody must have told her to lay off the waltzing, because the time signatures here tend to get less and less trivial; not challenging enough to approach avantgarde levels, but diverse and unpredictable enough to lay off any accusations of laziness. She is clearly interested in exploring the possibilities of classical and «retro-modern» instrumentation in the modern studio, and I respect that. I only wish that the songs had been as memorable as they were on Philharmonics, which is still not the case, alas.

Atmosphere-wise, ʽStretch Your Eyesʼ is clearly an improvement over most of Aventine. The combination of whale-like synthesizer sounds with the quietly, but firmly plucked strings and bowed cellos really gives it a sort of «walking under water» feel, a perfect backdrop for an equally glorious performance... but this is where the song falls short, because other than her usual «frozen lady of the lake» tone, Agnes does not reward the instrumental mix with any outstanding moments of vocal magic; actually, she's no better and no worse than Lana Del Rey now in this department, although I'd still take her instrumental compositions over Lana's in a whiff.

On ʽFamiliarʼ, she makes an awful mistake by having the chorus sung by an uncredited male performer who sounds like Antony Hegarty (oh, sorry, Anohni) with a particularly sore throat, turning the song from something that was distinctly Agnes Obel into something else that is even more distinctly not. I know it's supposed to be a you-and-I duet and all, but in her own singing, even when it is hookless, she manages to avoid theatrical mannerisms and come across as a real human being — so why is she taking a walk to the summit at night with a guy who sounds as if he wouldn't really be interested in girls in the first place? Also, the music here is getting way too dangerously close to New Age values, even for my tastes.

Still, I cannot get truly angry at most of these songs. The title track, for instance, has something Eno-like about it in its soothing piano and vocal harmony ambience. ʽStoneʼ does the same with acoustic guitar (and actually adds a strange vocal hook, which always sounded like "stone canopy, stone canopy" to me until I learned that it was really the artist asking herself whether she can be of stone — do not worry, Frøken Obel, you are of stone, in way... or should that be fiberglass? Citizen Of Fiberglass, yes, that would be a good title).

Anyway, without going into too much detail on the rest of this stuff: she is still getting a good sound of all these instruments, and, technically, she remains an above-average composer, but the new twists and expansions do not change my base impression that she has already made her single most important statement, and that she is going to spend the rest of her life just bathing us in the somewhat shapeless beauty of her impressionistic approach. Which is nice and all, but as long as she is incapable of finding any particularly heart-tugging soundwave configurations, I do not find myself interested in trying to decode her enigmatic messages, or defining the types of persons to whom her sorrowful and subtle music would appeal the most. Perhaps she should try coming out of that bunker? Or at least, exchange it for a less soft-padded one?..

Cass McCombs: Humor Risk

CASS McCOMBS: HUMOR RISK (2011)

1) Love Thine Enemy; 2) The Living Word; 3) The Same Thing; 4) To Every Man His Chimera; 5) Robin Egg Blue; 6) Mystery Mail; 7) Meet Me At The Mannequin Gallery; 8) Mariah.

McCombs' second album, in his own words, was "just punched out", and it certainly sounds like that. If the ultimate keywords for Wit's End were «slow, draggy, and atmospheric», then Humor Risk clearly tries to restore the balance with «upbeat, loud, and energetic». Unfortunately, that does not make it much of an improvement over its more pensive and serious older brother. It only makes it more obvious how annoying McCombs can get when he is not really trying.

Let us keep it clean and precise. Cass has always had and still has his way with words. You take a song like ʽLove Thine Enemyʼ and just look at the lyrics — and there are some sharp contrasts there, like "Every idiot thing you say speaks of pain and truth / Because of the beautiful way your tongue can seduce". He walks a nice thin line between the mystical sarcasm of Dylan and the heart-on-sleeve attitude of simplistic indie writers, provoking and challenging at least a little bit in almost every song. But his singing, so magical at times on A, has all but deteriorated to a monotonous murmur; and as for the music, the song has little going for it other than a distorted three-chord rock riff. Does that suffice to count for «enchantment»? Sorry, no.

Some people have compared his attitude on this tune to the classic sounds of The Velvet Under­ground — this is very, very silly, in my opinion, but since the comparison has been made, it makes sense to make use of it and remind everybody that on classic simple VU rockers, as mono­tonous as they could be, the atmosphere was generated by the total unity of purpose between all of the song's elements. You had a nasty guitar sound, a nasty vocalist, and some nasty lyrics that, taken together, generated Rebel Art like crazy. But in ʽLove Thine Enemyʼ, the primal power of the distorted riff is wasted — it does not really click in perfection with the lyrics or the vocals or the rest of the arrangement. It's just there because Cass likes to give us a bit of simplistic rock riffage from time to time, to establish a connection with the old punk spirit despite not having a punk spirit himself.

It gets worse, much worse on ʽMystery Mailʼ. At least ʽLove Thine Enemyʼ is short, but this other song, riding a half-century old chord sequence without any variety whatsoever, goes on for eight minutes. I don't know if the story about «Daniel» and his unfortunate experiments with drugs and the law is autobiographical, or allegorical, or culled from real or fictional sources, or is just some homage to a Springsteen or a Tom Petty ballad, and I certainly do not care to know: all I know is that the whole thing is mind-numbingly boring. (It also rips off its vocal intro and outro from Blondie's ʽThe Hardest Partʼ — bet that is a bit of exclusive trivia you won't find anywhere else in the world other than on Only Solitaire). Is this art? Is this entertainment? Is this meaning­ful self-expression? Is this a triumph of freedom, when you can just walk into the studio, record any tripe that comes into your head on the spur of the moment and release it publicly, knowing full well that, no matter what you do, out of 7 billion people on this planet, there's bound to be at least a couple hundred thousand who will fall for it?..

I will admit that ʽThe Same Thingʼ, ʽTo Every Man His Chimeraʼ, ʽMeet Me At The Mannequin Galleryʼ and the creaky lo-fi album closer ʽMariahʼ all have some pretty vocal moments. ʽThe Same Thingʼ has a Lennon-like aura to its echoey, double-tracked vocals, but I'm talking of one phrase here — one vocal phrase repeated over and over and over for six minutes (except for the bridge sections that are nowhere near as moody). ʽTo Every Manʼ has one lovely chord change that you will already hear around 0:40 during the instrumental introduction — to get them in the vocal version, you will have to endure about a minute of super-slow, super-sparse indie-bluesy lethargic playing for each one. (As a consolation bonus, you will be pleased to learn that "California makes me sick / Like trying with a rattlesnake your teeth to pick" — a bit of Latin poetry syntax here, but quite expressive imagery all the same). And ʽMariahʼ manages to turn this particular proper name into a seductive vocal hook, rhyming it with ʽdesireʼ, ʽthe fireʼ, ʽnever tiresʼ, ʽtake me higherʼ, and even ʽinside herʼ, but even this really pretty acoustic ballad is spoiled by the idiotic lo-fi production, burying it in white noise just because we somehow have to go on and simulate the lack of access to a normal studio environment.

As far as I'm concerned, this is not a case of a talented artist suddenly (or gradually) deprived of his talent by illness, dementia, or commercial pressure. This is a case of a talented person inten­tionally wasting his talent on adaptation to the stereotypical image of an «indie artist» — you know, one for whom «sincerity» and «telling it like it is, but from your own and nobody else's individual perspective» means everything, while everything else (original melody, fresh arran­gement, musicality as such) means nothing. In other words, a case of crapola that deserves a very harsh thumbs down, and serves as a good example, I believe, of the overall unhealthy influence of «artistic expectations» on people who could do much, much better. 

Candlemass: Live

CANDLEMASS: LIVE (1990)

1) The Well Of Souls; 2) Dark Are The Veils Of Death; 3) Bewitched; 4) Solitude; 5) Dark Reflections; 6) Under The Oak; 7) Demon's Gate; 8) The Bells Of Acheron; 9) Through The Infinitive Halls Of Death; 10) Samarithan; 11) Mirror, Mirror; 12) At The Gallows End; 13) The Sorcerer's Pledge.

Live heavy metal albums are usually a waste of time, with two exceptions: (a) metal bands that still preserve a lot of that old kick-ass rock'n'spirit, like Judas Priest, may follow the old principle of compensating for studio slickness with raw live energy; (b) mediocre metal bands that sound way too monotonous from album to album may have live albums that simply work as decent introductions / summaries of their overall sound, usually concentrating on the better stuff and leaving out the crap. Candlemass Live is a typical representative of group (b) — if you are interested in the band, but not enough to explore them in detail, this is a really good place to start... and, perhaps, to end.

Recorded on their native ground (in Stockholm), the album finds the classic lineup in as good a form as possible, with fine production (better than on the early studio records, actually), a rather tepid reception from the audience (which is okay, since it only helps the songs to sound better) and, most importantly, a near-perfect setlist — at least, all of my favorite Candlemass songs are here, and the energy level leaves me with nothing to complain about. ʽDemon's Gateʼ, ʽSolitudeʼ, ʽSorcerer's Pledgeʼ — these live versions totally correct all the original studio murkiness, with normally sounding drums and real deep rumble-crunch from the guitars, as compared to the almost lo-fi production quality of Epicus; honestly, even if you are a certified metalhead, I can't see how you'd like to go back to the 1986 values after hearing these versions.

Other than these two important details — great sound quality and intelligent setlist — there is really not much to say. Marcolin live is just as obnoxious as he is in the studio, but not that much more obnoxious: the obligatory audience-baiting is kept to a relative minimum (a few oi-oi-oi's here and there to get them a-clappin' and a-stompin', but nothing even close to Ozzy's trademark "let me fuckin' see your fuckin' hands, come on!"), and his treatment of Längqvist's material would probably have completely satisfied Längqvist himself (but not me). Johansson's leads are as fluent and technically perfect as they are in the studio, sometimes with a bit of extra flash. And structurally, the songs are played as close to the originals as possible.

I understand that there are several different versions of the album floating around — for instance, my version adds ʽThe Bells Of Acheronʼ, and then there's a 2-CD version with a separate show from 1988 as a bonus — but this is already in the sphere of trivia, useless for casual fans, so let's just top this off with a thumbs up and close the book on this first stage in the life of Candlemass, ending with the departure of Marcolin, and bringing on an image renovation for the new decade.

Caravan: Blind Dog At St. Dunstan's

CARAVAN: BLIND DOG AT ST. DUNSTAN'S (1976)

1) Here Am I; 2) Chiefs And Indians; 3) A Very Smelly, Grubby Little Oik; 4) Bobbing Wide; 5) Come On Back; 6) Oik (reprise); 7) Jack And Jill; 8) Can You Hear Me?; 9) All The Way (With John Wayne's Single-Handed Liberation Of Paris).

The first Caravan album to completely drop all pretense and be qualified as a pure pop record is naturally despised by large amounts of progressive rock fans, judasing it for all it's worth, and just as naturally ignored by the majority of pop fans — unlike Genesis, Caravan were unable to adapt sufficiently well to the new reality and find themselves an entirely new base of support. By­passed by main audiences for being too unattractive and lambasted by critics by being too slick and commercial, Blind Dog At St. Dunstan's fell through the cracks and sank like a stone. Never mind the unimportant fact that it incidentally happened to be one of the best pop albums released in the small chronological interim between the Golden Age of Art Rock and the radical change in musical fashion arriving with punk and New Wave.

There is no conceptuality here (other than four songs on Side A joined together in a single suite, but this time they are not even listed under any single title), no musical innovation, no lengthy instrumental passages, no avantgarde influences, no spiritual messages — only a bunch of pop songs with influences from music hall, folk rock, funk, R&B, and even a bit of proto-disco. But now that the transition is made complete, the band happens to embrace the new light style with verve. Dave Sinclair is once again temporarily out of the band, replaced by Jan Schelhaas, a new guy with good technique and few ambitions, being perfectly happy to simply be one of the boys and, for the most part, keeping out of the spotlight; but his playing agrees very well with Hastings and Wedgewood, and Richardson's viola and flute, though applied now to seriously different types of material, are still vital to the overall sound.

The only non-Hastings song on the entire record is Wedgewood's ʽChiefs And Indiansʼ, and it is a major improvement over his contributions on Cunning Stunts. A simple tale of discord between two lovers, it begins as a soft British music hall piece, somewhere in between Ray Davies and Alan Price, then launches into an angry funk-rock escapade with all the band members taking short, snappy solos (Wedgewood's bit of bass, eventually sliding down into a pool of nasty fuzz, is the best one, but everybody else shines as well) before returning back to music hall mode for the outro. What really sells the song, apart from all the snappy energy, is that it actually manages to sound cool — not too serious and pathetic, like ʽWelcome The Dayʼ on the previous record, but not straightforwardly comical, either. The lyrics, the vocals, the instrumental passages all have this air of sharp, witty sarcasm, and it is a defining feature of the album in general.

Take a seemingly silly, superficial funk-pop song like ʽJack And Jillʼ: its very title places it in the ʽMary Had A Little Lambʼ category, and its lyrics are, indeed, a modern-day expansion of the old nursery rhyme with its potential sexual innuendos (well, leave it to Pye to find the subtext of physical romance in virtually everything — and, for that matter, the very title of the album is also a masked allusion to physical romance, spelled out in more detail during a well-audible bit of dialog at the end of the song: "what are those two doggies doing over there?" — "well, the first one is blind and his friend behind is pushing him all the way to St. Dunstan's!"). But really, the song is made by Wedgewood's spin­ning bass line and its interaction with Richardson's syn­copated viola (how often do you hear funky bits played on a viola, anyway?), implying a sort of «trickster» atmosphere, friendly and mischievous at the same time. As simple as the song is, it's got some bottom to it — both in the direct musical sense (cool bass!) and in the artistic one.

Each song has its fair share of hooks and attractions. ʽA Very Smelly, Grubby Little Oikʼ has not only enriched my knowledge of non-literary English language (next time somebody offends you, just call him a "grubby oik" in response and watch him spend the rest of his days in confusion), it also gave me a fun pop-rock riff and a catchy chorus — which then makes a masterful transition, by means of the vocal-synth merge, into the slow atmospheric instrumental ʽBobbing Wideʼ and then back into the realms of catchy soft-pop with ʽCome On Backʼ. Now ʽCome On Backʼ could be thought of as a pretty straightforward and «bottom-less» tune (although it really depends on which way you want to interpret the line "only when you come, you know that we'll be one"); but the real fun thing about it is that as soon as it is over, it is immediately reprised in the form of a gospel-pop coda, combining the melody of ʽCome On Backʼ with the lyrical subject of ʽGrubby Little Oikʼ with guest-starring Chanter Sisters providing the vocals. So is this really a four-part thematic suite about the adventures of a representative of the lower classes, or is it rather an exer­cise in sarcastic absurdism, firmly placing melodic fun over serious content?..

I have mentioned Ray Davies and Alan Price, but I think an even more substantial comparison here would be with Wings — the album shares a lot in common with McCartney's style in the Seventies, what with all the soft keyboards, sweet vocals, stylistic variety, and preference of humor over seriousness; no wonder, then, that it tends to get underrated in exactly the same ways in which people still like to criticize Wings At The Speed Of Sound or London Town, and that I, personally, find myself fond of it in much the same way I am fond of those records. In fact, the last and longest song, ʽAll The Wayʼ, starts out with Pye sounding almost like Macca at his most sentimental (think ʽMy Loveʼ?) — and then transitions into a perfectly McCartney-esque chorus, simple, instantly memorable, and so sincere and touching that looping it for a very lengthy coda just seems like the most logical decision to take (especially because it's hard to think of a perfect resolution for the rising line "better than before, better than all after", so the only thing to do is just let it roll on and on and slowly fizzle away into a quiet whistle pattern). For the record: the reference to John Wayne in the subtitle is completely gratuitous (actually, ʽAll The Wayʼ is the only song on the album that begs to be taken completely seriously, with no signs of tongue-in-cheek attitude anywhere in sight).

Overall, the correct approach here is not to get worried about the lack of challenge or experi­mentation and simply to let yourself get carried away by the waves of vocal hooks and instrumen­tal sharpness — the music, that is, and not the supra-musical ambition, for which we also have a time and a place, but different ones. Pretty soon afterwards, Caravan would finally start losing their way in a world of rapidly changing fashions; but just for this once, their fine-tuned pop instincts worked out perfectly. Big thumbs up.

The 5th Dimension: Stoned Soul Picnic

THE 5TH DIMENSION: STONED SOUL PICNIC (1968)

1) Sweet Blindness; 2) It'll Never Be The Same Again; 3) The Sailboat Song; 4) It's A Great Life; 5) Stoned Soul Picnic; 6) California Soul; 7) Lovin' Stew; 8) Broken Wing Bird; 9) Good News; 10) Bobbie's Blues; 11) The Eleventh Song (What A Groovy Day!).

The worst thing that could happen to the 5th Dimension was Jimmy Webb beginning to pay more attention to his own career — or, for the time being, to the career of Richard Harris, whom he'd enriched with ʽMacArthur Parkʼ in early 1968, as well as all the other songs and production work on his first album, at the expense of his former pets. The only Webb composition on the band's third album is roughly tacked on at the end under the title of ʽThe Eleventh Songʼ (because, you know, nice sunshine pop albums are supposed to contain even numbers of songs, but we did need a Jimmy Webb seal of approval, if only at the very last moment), and it is an obvious quickie throwaway — "what a groovy day it turned out to be, doo-doo-doo" is its only line, and coming off a generally disappointing record, it has a strong whiff of self-parody, which is pretty bad for a band that often already comes across as parodic in its very nature.

The 5th Dimension are completely in the hands of Bones Howe now, the by-default sunshine pop producer of the era, already noted for his work with The Association and now working his tepid magic on these guys — but he is nowhere near as adventurous as Webb, so out go the sitars, for instance, and all that pseudo-Eastern crap, and in goes even more brass and strings than there used to be. Theoretically, this is no big deal: it's not like Webb was particularly innovative or subtle in his use of sitar, and it's not as if Howe's idiom for the band results in completely dif­ferent textures and atmospheres. What is worse, however, is the sore lack of good songwriting: with Webb largely out of the picture, Howe and the other industry people are forced to fall back on even more cuddly and safe brands of corporate songwriting.

Worst of the bunch is a guy called Jeffrey Comanor, contributing pompous Neil Diamond-ish crap (ʽIt'll Never Be The Same Againʼ) and hookless folksy mush that tries to mask melodic paucity with lush flute-and-chime panoramas (ʽThe Sailboat Songʼ); he is equally bad at upbeat pop-rock (ʽLovin' Stewʼ, which has nothing to its name except for the strong tempo) and dream balladry (ʽBobbie's Bluesʼ — pretty male-female vocal harmony arrangement, but hardly ever elevated above the level of background muzak). Bob Alcivar's and Denny McReynolds' contri­butions (ʽBroken Wing Birdʼ and ʽIt's A Great Lifeʼ) are equally boring.

The saving grace of the album are two songs by the still relatively little-known Laura Nyro — ʽSweet Blindnessʼ and the title track, both of which had already managed to come out on Laura's own Eli And The Thirteenth Confession by the time The 5th Dimension got around to releasing their interpretations. These should probably be found worthy even by major fans of Laura: ʽSweet Blindnessʼ capitalizes even deeper on the contrasts between the slow and fast parts of the song than Laura's original, and the vocal duo of Florence and Marilyn add extra (and quite welcome) muscle to the joyful Motown-ish punch of the original, bringing it closer in style to something like Martha & The Vandellas. Likewise, they add extra funkiness to ʽStoned Soul Picnicʼ while managing to preserve its fussy spirit, a mix of psychedelia and gospel that makes the song equally interesting to fans of the Lord and lovers of the Grass. The ridiculous thing about it is that some­how, Laura Nyro material here goes interspersed with Jeff Comanor material — imagine some honest-to-good interpreter covering a mix of Beatles and Monkees songs (and I like the Monkees, but that would be irrelevant in this case).

The third and last single from the record was ʽCalifornia Soulʼ by Ashford & Simpson, a song that is definitely better than any of the Comanor stuff, but I still do not like it too much: it's another tune that is clearly influenced by ʽCalifornia Dreamingʼ way too seriously, and didn't we already have ʽCalifornia My Way?ʼ Here, it's like half of the vocal lines were lifted directly off the Mamas & Papas masterpiece — rather pitiful.

All in all, a major disappointment, although I still won't turn the album down explicitly because of the excellent Nyro covers and the fact that the vocal performances and arrangements are still complex and at least «beautiful» on a perfunctory level. Nevertheless, you're much better off just picking out the individual highlights here, due to the total lack of consistency.

Champion Jack Dupree: Vol. 3 (1945-1949)

CHAMPION JACK DUPREE: VOL. 3: 1945-1949 (2009)

1) You've Been Drunk; 2) Santa Claus Blues; 3) Gin Mill Sal; 4) Let's Have A Ball; 5) Going Down Slow; 6) Hard Feeling; 7) How Long, How Long Blues; 8) Mean Old Frisco; 9) I Think You Need A Shot; 10) Bad Whiskey And Wild Woman; 11) Bus Station Blues; 12) Love Strike Blues; 13) Wet Deck Mama; 14) Big Legged Mama; 15) I'm A Doctor For Women; 16) Cecelia, Cecelia; 17) Going Down To The Bottom; 18) Fifth Avenue Blues; 19) Highway 31; 20) Come Back Baby; 21) Chitlins And Rice; 22) One Sweet Letter; 23) Lonesome Bedroom Blues; 24) Old Woman Blues; 25) Mean Mistreatin' Mama; 26) Featherweight Mama; 27) Day Break.

Nothing much happening on this particular volume, either, except that, after the first three tracks, the Champion is consistently accompanied on guitar by Brownie McGhee — sometimes as part of a trio, sometimes in a slightly larger band: a special landmark is ʽCecelia, Ceceliaʼ (sic!), where, for the first time ever, Dupree uses an ensemble of backing vocalists, a full rhythm section and a guest sax player. Reason? Well, the song itself is nothing but a lyrical rewrite of ʽCaldoniaʼ, recorded one year earlier by Louis Jordan, and, evidently, this was Dupree's first stab at imitating the big band jump blues approach of Jordan, which was quickly gaining ground as a replacement for the antiquated urban blues stylistics.

In fact, the liner notes do state that Dupree was finding life in New York particularly hard in the late 1940s, what with public interest moving away from strict blues (for which Chicago was becoming the main playground) and into the sphere of something more boogie-danceable. Never­theless, the stubborn artist ploughed on, reluctant to move out of his favorite city, and even found occasional opportunities to make recordings, usually on small local labels. The «big band» stint with ʽCeceliaʼ was actually good for about four tracks — after that, it is back to small scale once again, with the same batch of similar-sounding blues and boogie tunes as always.

That said, some of these duets between Jack and Brownie rise notably above the average level: see ʽBad Whiskey And Wild Womanʼ (sic!), a reflection on the subject of "by the year 1963, I wonder what will become of me?" with Brownie echoing the singer's dark forebodings with some suitably grumbly lead lines in between some verse lines and allaying his worst fears with lighter, gentler, ripplier lines in between others — and also pushing Dupree as a pianist to try his best with a flourish-laden solo that seems to show off more than his standard technique. You do have to make an effort to sort them out from the chaff, though: much more often, it's just Jack boxing the keys over and over, concentrating on his verbal innuendos (ʽWet Deck Mamaʼ, ʽBig Legged Mamaʼ — the latter would soon turn into ʽBig Leg Emmaʼ and stay that way forever) rather than on varying his playing style, because nobody was buying his records anyway, so why bother?

The most unusual track on this volume is the last one — a moody slow blues entitled ʽDaybreakʼ, with Brownie playing a strangely distorted electric guitar and then, very soon, yielding the spot­light to the anonymous bass player, who plays a catchy, fluent, and, most importantly, loud jazzy melody, as if he were Willie Dixon or something. The weirdest thing is that we seem to know the names of the bass players for all the previous sessions (Count Edmondson first, and then Cedric Wallace of Fats Waller's fame), but not for this particular one. It's probably That Perfect Bass Player Who Came From Heaven, and then went back again after laying down this one perfect bass track. What made him descend upon Champion Jack Dupree, of all people, remains a mystery — just one more odd chapter in the already befuddling life story of this guy.

The Rolling Stones: Undercover

THE ROLLING STONES: UNDERCOVER (1983)

1) Undercover Of The Night; 2) She Was Hot; 3) Tie You Up (The Pain Of Love); 4) Wanna Hold You; 5) Feel On Baby; 6) Too Much Blood; 7) Pretty Beat Up; 8) Too Tough; 9) All The Way Down; 10) It Must Be Hell.

Gather round, children, and I'll tell you a story about little G. S.'s first taste of Undercover. It was something like late 1988 or early 1989, I do believe, and little G. S. was enjoying the first cultural benefits of perestroika — such as, for instance, being able to trot over to the nearest «Culture club» where some seedy dude would surreptitiously show you his album of... no, not pictures of naked women (although this was not totally out of the question, either), but titles of rock music LPs that you could get him to tape for you for an exorbitant sum that devastated all of your lunch money; but what was lunch in comparison to the ability to finally add Aftermath, or Between The Buttons, or Get Yer Ya Ya's Out!, to your already impressive (by the standards of the times) catalog of your Dad's classic Stones LPs?..

Another cultural benefit was being able to make your way to another «culture club», where equally seedy dudes (who must have made a real fortune with this), equipped with enviable VHS players and color TV screens, were just as happy to take your money for showing you pirated copies of movies you could previously only dream about — everything from Help! and Yellow Submarine to Jesus Christ Superstar and Woodstock... nope, probably not Woodstock, I think they still had a thing about nudity back then, even in a semi-underground setting like that. Any­way, what I'm getting at is that one of those days, little G.S. finally scooped together enough dough to gain entrance to the screening of Video Rewind, a musical program said to be focusing on music videos and performances by The Rolling Stones — nothing else was known beforehand about this, and so little G.S. happily went along, excited beyond measure at the perspective of actually seeing his beloved Get Yer Ya Ya's Out! come to life on screen, or something like that, at least. "Greatest rock'n'roll band in the world", remember?

What little G.S. saw on the screen that evening became one of the biggest shocks of his life, a childhood trauma that still resonates within him even (almost) thirty years later. Instead of seeing a great rock'n'roll band playing with (demon) fire on stage, he saw a bunch of clownish-looking freaks who spent most of their screen time entertaining viewers with dumb, cheap thrills. And at the center of this all were three videos that the freaks in question, as young G.S. properly learned only years later, shot for the Undercover album — a straightforward anthem to sexual arousal with focus on trouser buttons popping rather than the music (ʽShe Was Hotʼ), an equally straight­forward anthem to blood-and-guts with focus on red fluids, chainsaws and chopped body parts rather than the music (ʽToo Much Bloodʼ), and, finally, an ode to violence, guns, explosions with focus on Keith Richards shooting Mick Jagger through the head rather than the music (ʽUnder­cover Of The Nightʼ). It did not help matters much that the entire program was ran through the perspective of an awfully gynoid-like made-up leader of the band, or that one of the culminating moments was a video of ʽBrown Sugarʼ with interspersed bits of footage from the 1976 and 1981 tours, in both of which the leader of the band seemed to behave like a village idiot, justifying the worst Soviet stereotypes of what a «degraded rock musician» was supposed to look and act like. But the Undercover videos were really the cream of the crop, and life was never the same.

One thing that watching the video really did for me was make me pull the plug completely on post-1970 Stones for a long time (I think that my first listen even to Sticky Fingers, let alone everything else, did not come until the mid-Nineties or so), but what was even worse, I guess, was the odd realization that somehow, somewhere, in some dark corner of the subconscious I enjoyed what I saw — in, perhaps, the same manner as some people would feel about being acci­dentally exposed to a peep show. It was cheap, stupid, superficial, disgusting (and, of course, morally decadent, as befits an all-corrupting capitalist society!), but it was also disturbing, stimu­lating, and... fun, to some extent. In any case, it turned out to be unforgettable, and for a long time, visions of Anita Morris burning Mick to a hole in the ground or of Keith and Ronnie chasing after Mick with chainsaws through a grizzly stone mausoleum would haunt me in my dreams, no matter how much I tried getting away from them. But it took me many, many years before I'd actually allowed myself to recognize the legitimacy of that feeling.

These days, of course, it's all laughable. Nobody who'd actually lived in the West throughout the late Sixties / Seventies / early Eighties could probably experience such strong emotions about a bunch of titillating music videos in 1983 — even if they were banned for controversial reasons on stations all around the UK and the US, more because of the overall conservative trend in the Reagan-Thatcher era than because they pretended to set some new standard in TV violence and profanity. And yet, Undercover still remains an interesting chapter in Stones history — and an album that tends to polarize fans very much, with some seeing it more in the «little G. S.» per­spective (uninspired, stupid songwriting abusing modern technologies and focusing on hooligan­ry, not music) and others defending it as an unusually creative and experimental set, perhaps even as the last time when the Stones actually tried to do something innovative, instead of just settling, once and for all, into a stale formula.

The thing is, there's a bit of truth in each of these approaches. Undercover is a brave experiment, and it is also the beginning of a rotten formula. Undercover genuinely hits a nerve or two, and it is also cheesy and embarrassing. It shows that the Stones, when they really needed to, could move forward with the times — and it also shows that they could really suck at this. How many people actually bought the album just because it featured a seductive naked woman on the front sleeve? How many people did not buy the album because it featured a seductive naked woman on the front sleeve? (Or, come to think of it, how many people did not buy the album because it featured a seductive naked woman on the front sleeve with all the most important areas «under cover», har har har?) Mind you, this could have been a factor, particularly given that Undercover became the band's first album in a long, long time to not hit the #1 spot either in the UK or in the US. Guess the young G.S. was not the only fan to be disappointed.

Anyway, on to the music. This is where the Eighties finally hit us, with sampling, phasing, and other technotronic marvels of production actively employed during the sessions, probably cour­tesy of co-producer Chris Kimsey and recording engineer Bob Clearmountain — the worst ser­vice of all being paid to Charlie Watts, whose drumming is largely eclipsed here by the huge wall of electronic effects on the drums, not always abysmal, but usually effacing one of the most dis­tinctive elements of what makes a Stones album a true Stones album. Add to this Jagger's on­going fascination with new musical genres, and there are plenty of tracks here that hardly ever sound like Stones tracks — in fact, there's even one track, ʽToo Much Bloodʼ, where Keith is not present at all, with guitarist Jim Barber laying on the New Wave-style riffage instead.

Then again, this is, perhaps, not the worst feature of the album. Any true admirer of the Stones' musical ambitions should actually be happy when the Stones try not to sound like «the Stones» (were that always so, we would not have us any Satanic Majesties, or any baroque pop, or any ʽFingerprint Filesʼ or ʽHeavensʼ), and, in fact, some of the weakest songs here are precisely the ones where they try to sound too hard as «the Stones». Case in point: ʽToo Toughʼ, one of the first totally generic Stones rockers, of which they'd have at least a couple on each subsequent record, with unimpressive second-hand riffage from Keith and generic cockiness from Mick. And does anybody even begin to remember ʽAll The Way Downʼ? Imagine a ʽShatteredʼ without its characteristic riff, without its funny vocal bits, without its humor, and with a chorus whose only line forever stays in need of a good resolution — that never comes because they probably allowed themselves ten minutes to cobble the song together, at best.

More than half of the album suffers not so much from excessive overproduction or embarrassing cheap thrills as it does from sheer laziness of approach. Why does ʽPretty Beat Upʼ sound like a scuzzy vocal improvisation that Jagger performs over a stiff, monotonous groove whose basic riff seems to have been lifted by Keith from Pete Townshend's ʽEminence Frontʼ? (And this time not even the sax player can help them — where Sonny Rollins played massive, smoothly running, coherent solos to send ʽSlaveʼ into the stratosphere, David Sanborn here plays isolated, choppy, powerless licks, or, at least, that's the way they sound in the mix). Why does ʽIt Must Be Hellʼ recycle the riff of Exile's ʽSoul Survivorʼ, and keeps doing that in a manner that shows Keith completely chained to the basic chord sequence, doomed to simply replay the same phrase over and over and over for five minutes? Whatever happened to the glory days of ʽCan't You Hear Me Knockingʼ, when the band showed no signs whatsoever of this stiff paralysis?

Not all of the experimentation is successful, either. For one thing, Undercover includes what is probably the Stones' worst ever attempt at a reggae song — well, remembering ʽCherry Oh Babyʼ, they never really felt at home with the genre (despite being good pals with people like Peter Tosh and all), but ʽFeel On Babyʼ, featuring the then-ubiquitous dynamic duo of Sly and Robbie (who were also behind the stiff production of Dylan's Infidels), is basically five minutes of nothing, an unbearably slickified, groove-less groove with minimal melodic ideas and a «wet jungle» atmo­sphere that feels too humorless to be entertaining and too overloaded with production gimmicks to be taken seriously.

On the other hand, ʽUndercover Of The Nightʼ itself remains arguably the highest point in the overall tragic story of Mick Jagger's uneasy relations with modern technology. On this track, the groove is actually well established five seconds into the song, with Wyman's funky bass, while Keith lays down gunshot-like power chords that are a perfect fit with the song's overall message of violence, chaos, and anarchy in Latin America. Even the electronic percussion is a good choice here, made to sound like incessant barrages of machine-gun fire, and by the time the song gets around to the instrumental break, with Keith and Ronnie wielding their axes like a couple of homicidal maniacs, it is hardly possible not to get pulled in. Small wonder that this is only one of  three songs here that still crop up from time to time in the Stones' live repertoire.

The other relative success — although this time, the song is so un-Stones like that they never even began to think about bringing it on stage, as Keith would probably veto the decision — is ʽToo Much Bloodʼ. Corny and cheaply provoking as it is, with Mick's retelling of the Issei Sagawa story and all, it still has the catchiest refrain on the album and, more importantly, a top notch brass groove — probably the only song in Stones history which is totally made by the horns rather than guitars (the guitars, as has already been mentioned, were played by Stones roadie Jim Barber who was told by Mick to «do an Andy Summers» — I think he did more of a David Byrne, myself, but that's hardly relevant anyway). Unlike ʽFeel On Babyʼ, ʽToo Much Bloodʼ is actually quite entertaining — although, brushing off the cobwebs of childhood phobias and traumas, I'd say that it works even better in conjunction with the video, which, for my money, is downright creepier and more disturbing than Michael Jackson's ʽThrillerʼ (under whose heavy influence it was almost certainly shot by Julien Temple); at the very least, Keith never looked more believable than when wedging a chainsaw in the back of a chair where Mick was sitting just a couple seconds ago!

The third video was made for the only other Mick-sung Undercover song that would later be performed live (you can see it, for instance, in the Shine A Light movie) — ʽShe Was Hotʼ — and this is the closest they come here to creating a «retro-sounding», circa ʽStar Starʼ time, bawdy Stones riff-rocker with Chuck Berry-isms a-plenty. Aside from the hilarious realization that it had been only three years since the release of ʽShe's So Coldʼ (and all the possible ensuing jokes about a three-year period of global warming, etc.), and the trouser-busting antics of Anita Morris in the accom­panying video, there's not much to say about this other than that, if you really really really loved ʽStar Starʼ, you will probably also love ʽShe Was Hotʼ, but a little less. At least it's better than those completely lifeless rockers on Side B, not least because it features old buddy Ian Stewart in his most naturally comfortable role of the boogie-woogie accompanyist — alas, for the last time in his sweet short life.

To complete the picture, a couple of words are probably in order on ʽTie You Up (The Pain Of Love)ʼ, a song every bit as horrible as its title implies it to be, but one towards which I have always felt a strange and deeply dirty attraction. It's not the first time and not the last time when Jagger played the role of Mr. Sex Drive Incarnate, but something about this particular recording, electronic percussion and libido-choked roar and warts and all, echoes that old Stooges vibe — the rugged, braindead caveman yearning for release, release, release! Stupid, I know, but let us count this as a secret guilty pleasure. So good they never thought about making a video for this, though, or the little G.S. might have been driven to complete despair back in 1989, enough to throw all his hard-earned Stones tapes in the nearest Soviet dust bin or something.

So, as you can see, as a whole Undercover can be anything but boring, even if, in parts, it con­tains some of the least interesting and inspiring Stones songs written up to that point. Ironically, though, while it was the first album to clearly demarcate the differentiating zones of interest for Mick and Keith, and while it is usually Keith who is thought of as the integral musical engine of the Stones rather than Mick, it is the new Mick-style material that still holds up a bit rather than Keith-style material. At that point, Mick was already considering a solo career and beginning to seriously pander to mainstream pop tastes and all the crap that they brought with them — but as for the freshly cleaned-up and internally (though not externally) rejuvenated Keith, he seems to have been far more preoccupied with his new passion, Patti Hansen, than with writing good music: his only vocal number here, ʽWanna Hold Youʼ, is a pop-rocker with no signs of a decent riff and a chorus that is more of a perfunctory love mantra than a melodic highlight. (But if it played its part in getting Patti to marry him, who's to argue that a song like that cannot have a certain objective value?). Beginning with Undercover, it became more and more of a chore to get a truly great riff out of Keith — blame it on a happy family life, or on the absence of heroin, or both (can one have a happy family life and heroin? only if your wife is Courtney Love, I'd guess), but the fact is, the well had really run dry, and therefore, blaming Mick for making the Stones to sound less like the Stones and more like the Mick Jagger Experience, which Keith did a lot in those days, was a bit hypocritical.

Still, if you want to have at least a mildly positive impression of the album, it is best to think of it in the context of its times (where it sounds quite kick-ass next to much, if not most of the stuff, that the Stones' peers were doing at the time) than in the context of the band's overall career. At least it is not as grossly self-parodic and lightweight as Emotional Rescue, for which we probably have to «thank» the production team, and even if ʽToo Much Bloodʼ is like Psycho II to the original Psycho of ʽMidnight Ramblerʼ, the level of titillation on this record is somewhat higher than the locker-room-level humour of the band around 1980. This understanding is not enough to earn it a thumbs up — honestly, if you have not heard Undercover, you are not missing much — but it is enough to soothe those childhood traumas, thirty years after the fact.

Agnes Obel: Aventine

AGNES OBEL: AVENTINE (2013)

1) Chord Left; 2) Fuel To Fire; 3) Dorian; 4) Aventine; 5) Run Cried The Crawling; 6) Tokka; 7) The Curse; 8) Pass Them By; 9) Words Are Dead; 10) Fivefold; 11) Smoke & Mirrors.

Unfortunately, Obel's second album firmly places her in the never-ending list of artists who may have said everything they had to say with their first shot, and then simply go on to say it again and again and again, for all those who love it when they are being told the same thing over and over as long as the speaker actually opens his/her mouth and produces fresh sound waves, instead of relying on this new-fangled «preserve it for posterity» recording technique. In other words, Aventine follows the same formula as Philharmonics, but with predictably diminished results.

Or, perhaps, not really «predictably»? Perhaps there are problems here that could have been avoided? For me, these problems start with the very first track. On Philharmonics, the brief impressionistic piano piece ʽFalling, Catchingʼ sounded wonderful — a perfectly captured piano tone and an engaging, subtle dynamics as the little piano riff smoothly wound its way upwards. In contrast, the opening piano instrumental on Aventine (ʽChord Leftʼ) seems to make more use of the sustain pedal, is slower, more emphatically sadder, and, on the whole, belongs far more effi­ciently on the soundtrack of some commercial melodrama than on an album vying for «piece of art» status (I wanted to write «high art», but let's keep this populist and democratic).

It is still okay, but it is quite reflective of the overall quality of the album, with generally less memorable and less musically interesting songwriting. Whether or not you loved ʽRiversideʼ, its waltzy structure and folksy vocal melody were at least catchy and well adapted to each other. On Aventine, the first song is ʽFuel To Fireʼ, a pure mood piece set to a two-chord piano riff and not varying at all for five minutes — still retaining the overall tastefulness, but absolutely amorphous as a composition that you'd want to possibly cherish and preserve in your head. And when it is immediately followed by ʽDorianʼ, another five-minute song that is essentially more of the same (gracefully mumbled, hookless singing set to a piano melody that even certain minimalist com­posers would probably have rejected)... you know something's gotta be wrong about that.

And these songs were the singles culled from this album — although the first one was ʽThe Curseʼ, a slightly better waltz piece (for some reason, the waltz tempo always seems to work better for Agnes) played by a bass / cello / piano trio and sung with some haunting vocal modula­tions; with its allegorical lyrics about a pseudo-mythical situation, it is the closest thing to a «chamber epic» on Aventine. Still, as far as songs salvageable for compilations go, I would not dwell too much on ʽThe Curseʼ — rather sticking up for the title track (another waltz, this time harp-based, with a very pretty cello / harp texture) and, perhaps, ʽRun Cried The Crawlingʼ (with a very Andrew Bird-like violin, probably played by Canadian Mika Posen, generally credited for violin on the album). And that's about it — everything else is pleasant at best, mind-numbing and somnambulant at worst.

What is really incredible about this is that the disappointment in no way rubs off on the positive impression I had of Philharmonics — I keep playing bits and snippets of songs from both albums back to back and I can't help but be somewhat bewildered at how her piano melodies that used to incorporate emotionally brilliant flourishes have so seriously melted into flat muzak, and at how her vocals, that used to find such a good balance between husky-dusky and subtle sharp­ness, are now almost always just husky-dusky (with the exception of a few relative highlights). Again, perhaps some people will think that naming your album after one of the seven hills of Rome and dedicating one of the songs to an Oscar Wilde character should suffice to redeem every other sin — I respectfully disagree. I do not give the album a thumbs down, because, all criticism aside, I still like the overall sound of it, which does not bother or offend me one bit; but where Philharmonics was a «subtly active» record, whose emotional charge gradually disclosed itself upon repeated listens, Aventine is a soporifically passive one. Any final recommendations? Well... to quote yet another ambitious singer-songwriter of our times who's had her ups and downs, "You better work bitch!"

Cass McCombs: Wit's End

CASS McCOMBS: WIT'S END (2011)

1) County Line; 2) The Lonely Doll; 3) Buried Alive; 4) Saturday Song; 5) Memory's Stain; 6) Hermit's Cave; 7) Pleasant Shadow Song; 8) A Knock Upon The Door.

In 2011, Cass McCombs released two complete albums — one that, according to him, was thought out slowly and meticulously, and another that was punched out more or less instanta­neously. And I do believe that with the first notes of Wit's End, it becomes easy to guess which one was which without having to listen to the second one — the words «slow» and «dreary» do not even begin to describe the lethargic coma that it is capable of inducing.

Now, of all people, I shouldn't be the one to be complaining about lethargy in reference to a Cass McCombs record. I mean, I was totally seduced by the multi-layered, aching, almost trans­cendental lethargy of A, and all through the next three albums I kept complaining how any attempt to introduce some energy, speed, and classic pop hookiness into his songs only detract from his strongest talents — so nothing could be more fine than a full return to the slowcore formula of A, right?.. Well, turns out it depends on certain conditions.

Take the second song here, ʽThe Lonely Dollʼ. It's five and a half minutes of a slow, never-chan­ging acoustic waltz, accompanied, I believe, by a soothing celesta, so that you could be plunged into a bit of a «dollhouse magic» state — and with quasi-autobiographical lyrics that tell of the protagonist's relation with "a singing doll and her grievous call". Nice? Nice. But five and a half minutes? If anything, the song sounds like a minimalist version of Dylan's ʽ4th Time Aroundʼ, borrowing the same vocal arrangement (in fact, I'm almost sure Bob could sue if he wanted to), but with less attractive lyrics, less intricate musical texture, and set at an even slower tempo. And the worst thing about it is, it does not cast a magic spell. It simply feels too obvious, and Cass' vocals have become so sweet and smooth by now, you could almost mistake him for James friggin' Taylor — who needs it?

The whole record is a collection of similar lullabies, some of them crossing the seven minute border: ʽMemory's Stainʼ is a particular offender, being also set to waltz tempo and eventually just settling down into a snail-paced ambient instrumental, where a piano and a bass clarinet duet with each other in some parallel universe where five seconds of their time is one minute in ours. And wherever you go, you find McCombs singing in the same quiet, semi-whispered manner, intentionally avoiding anything that could be construed as emotional sharpness. This could be legit if the songs weren't so lazy — but McCombs is not a great composer, and all of these chord sequences you've already heard millions of times before, and now that he is focused on keeping his arrangements as sparse as possible, always centered around a simplistic piano or acoustic guitar part... really, whenever this album is at its worst (and that happens quite often), it is simply impossible to treat it as anything more than background ambience.

I count exactly two songs here that I wouldn't mind hearing again. The opener, ʽCounty Lineʼ, shares the typical flaws of the album — slow, lethargic, criminally underarranged — but, perhaps by accident, it falls upon a great descending chord change right at the beginning: "on my way to you, old county", he sings, and then plunges downwards: "...hoping nothing's changed", with an air of bleakness and a sense of black depth from which you know that everything's changed, and few of it for the better. Later on, he continues adding great touches to the performance, using all of his typical range tricks, from baritone to falsetto, and that proverbial heart-tug is there all right. Alas, the next six songs have absolutely none of that — and in order to get to the album's second relative success, you have to allow for a 30-minute nap on the couch.

That second relative success is once again Dylan-related, because it's sort of an attempt to create his own equivalent of ʽDesolation Rowʼ. Yes, you guessed right: the song goes on for almost 10 minutes (and wouldn't you know it, it's another waltz!), with eight verses (should be ten — the Dylan song has ten), each of which ends with the declamation of the song's title, ʽA Knock Upon The Doorʼ. The lyrics are just as impenetrable (maybe even more impenetrable), but there's some sense of humor here, and a whiff of intrigue and mystery as opposed to nothing but somnambu­lance on the previous six songs. Needless to say, the 10-minute length is still excruciating for such simplicity and such slowness, and it is all the more frustrating when you think that, had he only brought back the multi-layered baroque arrangements of A, he might have totally gotten away with it (remember that with Dylan, for instance, much of the saving grace of ʽSad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlandsʼ was provided by the energetic and dense backing band). Still, perhaps it is precisely the song length that at least makes certain there's some impression of the song back in your head once the album is over.

On the whole, how could I defend this? It's almost as if the guy got so totally self-confident, he now believes that an album without interesting melodies, without creative and complex arran­gements, with intentionally lazy singing, with ridiculously outstretched song lengths, and with arrogantly obvious Dylanisms will suffice to get fan support and rave reviews in the indie press (and it did: "the enigmatic singer-songwriter returns with a dark set of songs backed by spare instrumentation and crafts what might be his best LP yet" — our friends from PitchforkMedia), mostly centered around the lyrics and their sad sad sad tales of loneliness, depression, and nostal­gia. And hey, I love sad sad sad tales of loneliness, depression, and nostalgia, but goddammit, there's so many of them on the market already... and just as we'd finally found a guy who could seemingly tell them in a fresh, unconventional manner, he goes all lazy and generic on us. And no, scattered lyrical references to Abelard, Admiral Byrd, and Memphis-huckster-Hitler-hustler do not really count as redemptive factors, so a thumbs down it is. Talk about a self-referential LP title — what a bummer.