Arthur Alexander: Lonely Just Like Me

ARTHUR ALEXANDER: LONELY JUST LIKE ME (1993)

1) If It's Really Got To Be This Way; 2) Go Home Girl; 3) Sally Sue Brown; 4) All The Time; 5) Lonely Just Like Me; 6) Every Day I Have To Cry; 7) In The Middle Of It All; 8) Genie In The Jug; 9) Mr. John; 10) Johnny Heart­break; 11) There Is A Road; 12) I Believe In Miracles.

It is not quite clear what exactly drew Alexander out of bus-driving retirement: some people men­tion a «renewed interest in his legacy», but surely such an interest could only have very limited distribution anyway. Perhaps it took him fifteen years to understand that, by now, it was perfectly all right for people to record music the way they would like to record it without an obligation to seek mass commercial appeal. Or, more probably, it just took him fifteen years to find a record label that would want him in the first place.

The label was Nonesuch (not yet under the roof of Warner Bros.), and the album — one of the most delightful small-scale comebacks of the 1990s. Apparently, Alexander took the bus-driving business quite seriously: only half of the album is comprised of new material, written God knows when, with the other half (as befits most of the blues, jazz, and R&B comebacks from the «real old days») consisting of re-recordings of old hit material — and it is, of course, debatable whe­ther we really need a fourth version of 'In The Middle Of It All'. But in the end, it doesn't matter at all. What matters is how classy it all sounds.

First, it is almost impossible to date these recordings to 1993. The drums have a slightly «proces­sed» feel to them, and the electronic piano sound and synthesized strings constitute another mil­dly unpleasant giveaway, but, other than that, the record seems to have been made exactly the way Arthur would have it. The man drove his bus through the Eighties without noticing a single thing going around, and thank God for that — Lonely Just Like Me sounds like good old school R'n'B / country-soul. Melodies, guitars, catchy choruses, human feeling, the works.

Actually, some of the new material is terrific. 'If It's Really Got To Be This Way' is gorgeously written and sung, with some nice slide playing attenuating the pain and grace in Arthur's voice, a lost classic totally on the level of 'Anna' and 'You Better Move On'. 'Genie In The Jug' bounces, delights, and saddens all at the same time; the "doo-doodley-doo"s of 'All The Time' are unusual­ly deeply felt for a doo-doodley-doo; 'There Is A Road' is built upon an overwhelming vocal cre­scendo — one that could have been performed in a much more technical manner by the likes of a Neil Diamond, but benefits far more from Arthur's trembling sincereness; and 'I Believe In Mira­cles' is a tender, lovingly naïve conclusion.

Moreover, I don't feel one bit of a difference between Arthur's early singing and his vocal powers on here — perhaps the voice got just a trifle deeper with age, but you'd really have to use serious acous­tic equipment to prove your point. The important thing is that his simple magic has not gone anywhere: Lonely Just Like Me fully justifies its title — few people could ever sing about bro­ken hearts with the kind of simplicity and adequacy that Alexander introduced back in the early 1960s, and, strange as it is, it still holds true in 1993.

I mean, people like Al Green came along and took the whole thing to an entirely new level of depth — making songs that mixed joy with pain directly, playing psychological torment with quasi-Shakesperian standards — but there is something to be said for holy simplicity as well, and especially for being able to move a heart without overplaying it. Most of these twelve cuts focus on that ability, making Lonely the only Arthur Alexander LP that is truly, to some extent, con­cep­tual in its nature.

It is nothing short of a mini-miracle, either, that Alexander had just enough time to put out this sole LP before, a few months later, succumbing to a fatal heart attack that finally put him out of his loneliness. Without it, I would still be tempted to classify him as a two-hit wonder; with it, his career got a suitably humble and elegant finale that confirmed it as, well, an actual career. And it seems that the record label people understood that as well: fourteen years later, the album was re-released on CD as Lonely Just Like Me: The Final Chapter, adding several guitar-only and ac­capella demos recorded for the album and, more importantly, a small live promotional perfor­mance played be­fore a well-receptive audience. They do not add much artistic or historical im­portance, but they do a good job of bringing out the vulnerable human side of Arthur to an even bigger extent.

A very natural thumbs up here, and a big thank you to the man for having stayed exactly the same through all these years, and also to producer Ben Vaughn who gave him a chance to show that to us before it was too late. Trust me, this is not a trifle here; this is soul food as essential as any of the man's greatest hits compilations, even if it may take a while to understand that.

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B. B. King: Makin' Love Is Good For You

B. B. KING: MAKIN' LOVE IS GOOD FOR YOU (2000)

1) I Got To Leave This Woman; 2) Since I Fell For You; 3) I Know; 4) Peace Of Mind; 5) Monday Woman; 6) Ain't Nobody Like My Baby; 7) Makin' Love Is Good For You; 8) Don't Go No Farther; 9) Actions Speak Louder Than Words; 10) What You Bet; 11) You're On Top; 12) Too Good To You Baby; 13) I'm In The Wrong Business; 14) She's My Baby.

"Makin' love is good for you", King tells us with the complacency of a man who really knows what he's talking about — implying that, perhaps, makin' love is still good for him, too, regard­less of the discrepancy between the year 2000 and his own birthdate, usually given as 1925. Ad­mittedly, it is great to know that the guy is still doing well in the life-enjoying department. Unfor­tunately, it is the only great thing about this album.

(Well, perhaps, other than letting us know that all of these years he's been "in the wrong business": "Should've been like Michael Jackson when I was the age of five / But I chose this guitar, now I'm broke and can't survive" — ha ha. Then again, considering the man's embarrassing stunt for Burger King two years later, perhaps he was being serious. No one can contest, after all, that the King of Pop did make a hell of a lot more dough than the King of Blues — on the other hand, whose life has been the longer and happier one?).

Anyway, Makin' Love is simply one more Blues On The Bayou: exact same band, exact same production, exact same styles and exact same evenness bordering on the boring, or maybe just plain boring — the «bordering» explained by the fact that it takes some guts to call a B. B. King album «boring». However, having already digested most of the man's discography, we now know what kind of things the man is really capable of, and few, if any, of these heights are scaled on Makin' Love's relatively timid and tepid workouts.

I wish I could recommend an outstanding solo or vocal part, but I cannot. 'I'm In The Wrong Bu­siness' is, indeed, a fun curio and a potential laugh riot for the jaded B. B. fan, just because the lyrics are so outrageous. As for the guitar licks — each one of these you've heard a million times by now, and, at the very least, owning Blues On The Bayou automatically makes owning Ma­kin' Love a complete waste of your money. Choose one and leave the other for your enemy.

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Avril Lavigne: Let Go

AVRIL LAVIGNE: LET GO (2002)

1) Losing Grip; 2) Complicated; 3) Sk8er Boi; 4) I'm With You; 5) Mobile; 6) Unwanted; 7) Tomorrow; 8) Anything But Ordinary; 9) Things I'll Never Say; 10) My World; 11) Nobody's Fool; 12) Too Much To Ask; 13) Naked; 14*) Why.

Question: AVRIL LAVIGNE? Why????? What's up with, like, GOOD music?

Answer: Hey, wouldn't you be bored, too, if all you ever had to review was good music?

Q: But it's not like you haven't written about bad music altogether. What about those fifteen awful Aretha Franklin albums all in a row?

A: Nah, that was just side effects of the trade. «Know your enemy» is a fairly wise maxim, and Aretha sure as hell isn't the enemy, no matter how much crap there is in her catalog.

Q: But Avril Lavigne? I mean, Avril Lavigne? Who the heck is Avril Lavigne? Who the hell is going to be listening to Avril Lavigne in five years' time? Hell, who on Earth is listening to Avril Lavigne right now? And how is it possible to write anything insightful about Avril Lavigne? I mean, even the T&A factor don't work properly this time!

A: Well, yeah, it's probably true that Avril, per se, does not offer all that much insight. It is far more interesting to take a look at the world in which a person as completely gray and un­re­mar­kable as Avril Lavigne could sell 16 million copies of her debut album, Let Go, earn the sucking-up of pretty much all mainstream press in existence, and become one of MTV's lead darling girls of the entire decade.

Q: Come on now, surely there is nothing particularly amazing or unpredictable about that. People are sheep and MTV people are their fascist shepherds, and Avril is just one of their poster girls. Nobody gives a damn about the actual music on Let Go being just a bunch of trivially rehashed pop-punk power chords; all that matters is that Lavigne is (a) «one of us» and (b) «a rebellious spirit». Nobody expects her dumb teenage audiences to sit and scratch their heads and think stuff like «hmm, this music is sort of simple and generic and unoriginal compared to Sigur Rós», and the dumb teenage audiences predictably satisfy expectations. What else is there to say?

A: Well, maybe not much, but sometimes it takes a good listen to an «awful» album like Let Go to properly trigger the thinking process, rather than to a «decent» recording. For instance, no one would probably insist that, in terms of complexity of melodies and arrangements, Let Go is in any way inferior to any «true» punk album ever released (the ones that really go after the three-chord aesthetics, I mean).

Q: You know better than me that it's not the complexity that counts, it's the catchiness and the energy and the spirit and the relevance. Don't tell me you get a kick out of comparing Let Go with The Clash. The bitch calls herself «punk» and she'd never even heard the Sex Pistols before crapping out this shit­pile.

A: Well, at the risk of offending somebody who cares, I'd say that Let Go got catchiness — at least, some of the singles, like 'Complicated', are instantaneously catchy, and some choruses eve­n­tually reach even my subconscious on subsequent listens ('Anything But Ordinary', 'My World'). Energy? Spirit? Look at her videos — she sure as hell is willing to invest quite a bit of energy in those performances. Crashing guitars into windshields and all. I mean, she certainly believes in the things she plays. She believes that the real-life opposition between «punk» and «ballet» is still relevant, and that in this opposition, «punk» = «Good» and «ballet» = «Evil», to be overthrown by the «cool people».

Obviously, we can be bitter about it and say she's really as dumb as that, to believe in that shit, but to just call her a «fake» and be done with it would be rather rash. How is she more «fake» than, say, The Apples In Stereo, who have built their entire career on mimicry and we still love them? Who is more «fake» — herself, clearly grounded in the realities of her life, no matter how generic it might be, or Björk, who has spent a lifetime constructing an alter ego as far removed from reality as possible? And «relevance» — that's absurd; she's been relevant for millions of people for almost a decade.

Q: Yeah, for millions of dumb people happy enough to chew on MTV's cud. I give you it may not be her fault; she's just another brainwashed victim herself, deeply believing that her music helps people out to «break stereotypes», «be themselves», «live their own lives», that she's doing some­thing honest and brave and artistic when in reality she's just a helpless cog in the machine, and her pathetic underdeveloped brain lacks the capacity to understand that. Really, what else is there to say? What next — shall we, God forbid, start discussing her lyrics? "He was a skater boy, she said see ya later boy, he wasn't good enough for her"? Aren't we doing the bitch, and all of her croonies, way too much of a favor even mentioning her existence?

A: I don't know, I've thought like that for a long time, but I'm not exactly sure these days. We can always pretend to ignore «artists» like Lavigne — the «we» in question meaning «elitist listeners who have given up on humanity as a whole» — but perhaps, if «we» are at all interested in not dwindling down eventually to something like 0,000001% of the population (statistically nearing to­tal non-exis­tence), it would make sense to at least try and spot the few good things about the girl, if only to make certain that we actually care about the rest of the world.

Sure, it's pretty damn grim to see what used to be «The Beatles type» vs. «The Stones type» mu­tate into «Britney or Avril?» these days. It's a tasty, juicy matter for sociologists, perhaps, but har­d­ly for raffinated music lovers. On the other hand, «we» keep seeing ourselves falling into our own trap. «We» do not like to come across as too pretentious and smarmy (or do we?), and «we» normally have no problem about enjoying simple music, but «we» can never resist poking fun at the likes of Lavigne and her fans, either. Maybe there's more to be said about Lavigne than just a bunch of jokes about skater boys?

Q: Come on then, let's hear it! Any deep intellectual considerations on Let Go and its overall im­por­tan­ce? Any provoking remarks on how to integrate its values with those of the culturally ad­vanced members of society?

A: Well...

....uh...

...Nah.

It's a pretty damn terrible record, to tell the truth. But I'm still thinking.

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The Apples In Stereo: New Magnetic Wonder

THE APPLES IN STEREO: NEW MAGNETIC WONDER (2007)

1) Can You Feel It?; 2) Skyway; 3) Mellotron 1; 4) Energy; 5) Same Old Drag; 6) Joanie Don't U Worry; 7) Sunndal Song; 8) Droplet; 9) Play Tough; 10) Sun Is Out; 11) Non-Pythagorean Composition 1; 12) Hello Lola; 13) 7 Stars; 14) Mellotron 2; 15) Sunday Sounds; 16) Open Eyes; 17) Crimson; 18) Pre-Crimson; 19) Vocoder Ba Ba; 20) Radia­tion; 21) Beautiful Machine Parts 1-2; 22) Beautiful Machine Parts 3-4; 23) My Pretend; 24) Non-Pythagorean Com­position 3.

After the embarrassing failure of Velocity Of Sound, the Apples promptly disappeared from the studio for about four years, only serving to further confirm how much of an embarrassing failure that album really was. In the interim, Schneider diverted himself by applying his immense mathe­matical skills to the creation of a brand new «Non-Pythagorean» musical scale based on natural logarithms, resulting in a whoppin' eighty seconds of truly revolutionary keyboard tones demon­strated on the album under review (apparently, this should mean that Pythagoras is not in any im­mediate danger); and Hilarie Sydney, the band's second biggest talent that was never given a pro­per chance to become its first, finally decided that to bear the tyranny of a bald man in glasses is a perverted form of self-humiliation, and announced her departure from the band. Fortunately, not before she got to bang more of those drums on New Magnetic Wonder, as well as contribute two of the best songs (or, frankly speaking, one, because 'Sunndal Song' and 'Sunday Sounds' are pret­ty much the exact same tune).

More importantly, they had enough time to correct the silly mistake they made on Velocity — ac­cidentally mutating into a generic alternative rock band, even if that was never the intention — and, this time, reinvent their sound in a way that is much more deserving of the Apples In Stereo­typical ideology. Sunny pop and psychedelia are back, in a big way, and now they are more tech­nological and futuristic than ever before. More than ten years, after all, have passed since their humble beginnings, and it is only too reasonable, chronologically, that they no longer salivate and slobber over Revolver, but rather over Electric Light Orchestra's A New World Record: the har­monies, the melodic moves, the big wall of sound, the sweet atmosphere of the Mellotrons and slide guitars, all of these things now treasure the Jeff Lynn legacy rather than John Lennon's.

It's a smart and seductive move, and it works. In conjunction with Schneider's songwriting skills that only seem to mature with age, it makes Magnetic Wonder one of the most instantly likeable Apples albums. Of course, nothing is perfect: for egotistic reasons, Schneider still had to fill it up with a set of brief «interludes», ranging from the already mentioned experiments in whuppin' Py­thagoras' ass to little bits of electronically encoded vocalizing and littler bits of dissonant piano playing. The result is a huge massive of 24 tracks, spread across two discs (even though the total running length is only slightly above 50 minutes), masking a group of tall-growing, healthy, but scattered trees under the guise of a dense, overwhelming forest.

Once you take out the scissors, though, and circumcise Schneider's big ego by throwing out all the fancy-wancy «artsiness», nothing is to detract you from just enjoying the music. The answer to 'Can You Feel It?' is by all means positive — the band opens the album with a frantic battle summon to "turn up your stereo", and even though the song still lets you feel the unpleasant echo­es of Velocity with its primitive grungy rhythm track, its melodic wah-wah lines and Schneider's insanely supplicating vocal melody more than compensate for it.

From then on, songs — as opposed to links — rarely let down. 'Energy' promises that "we're gon­na see sunlight" and, with but one verse repeated over and over again, is like a power pop mantra whose message could be annoying because of its repetitiveness if it weren't so goddamn true, not to mention catchy-friendly. 'Play Tough' finally gets it right about combining romantic atmosphe­re with memorable melodic lines — here is a song that is played, sung, and arranged in such a way that it could have fit in perfectly on the Kinks' Something Else (it even seems to borrow a few melodic moves from Ray Davies, including the descending scale of 'Sunday Afternoon'). Fi­nally, the line "you gotta get back to the place that you know you're gonna see your friends again" ('Radiation') gets my vote for «highest correlation of beauty and underratedness» in the band's en­tire catalog, if you know what I mean.

On a funny, but probably coincidental note, it is the band's most explicit Jeff Lynne imitation — 'Beautiful Machine, Parts 3-4' — that leaves me the coldest: injecting a lot of effort into the con­struction of an ELOesque sound wall, over which a distinct, shrill, Lynnesque nasal twang lays the vocals, they forget to add a pinch of feeling, and the song feels as hollow as their early Beat­les tributes, making the «Grande finale» a bit of a letdown after such a good set overall. But, heck, this is simply to remind us one more time, lest we forget, that The Apples In Stereo are not the Beatles, not the Kinks, and not even the new Electric Light Orchestra. Were they all of these things combined, would we have any incentive at all to go back to dusty «irrelevant» oldies? As it is, the pleasure is all mine to say it one more time: «Yes, Robert Schneider is a brilliant guy, in his own way, but if you like The Apples, all the more reason for you to take a true time machine, rather than a first-rate simulation». An honest thumbs up all the same, though, because, after all, real time machines work both ways.

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