Brenda Lee: Bye Bye Blues

BRENDA LEE: BYE BYE BLUES (1966)

1) A Taste Of Honey; 2) Good Life; 3) Flowers On The Wall; 4) Shadow Of Your Smile; 5) Remember Me When; 6) Softly As I Leave You; 7) Bye Bye Blues; 8) Make The World Go Away; 9) September In The Rain; 10) Rusty Bells; 11) What A Difference A Day Made; 12) Yesterday.

The funniest part about observing this stage of Brenda's career is the emergence of this «alternate music universe», reflected in her (or, rather, her producers') selection of contemporary material. In this alternate universe, the Beatles were masters of torch balladeering, competing with San­remo Festival pros over the amount of tears they could wring out of the eyes of the audience (so who's the winner, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: ʽYesterdayʼ or ʽSoftly As I Leave Youʼ?); the «teen pop» singles market was most effectively represented by The Statler Brothers (ʽFlowers On The Wallʼ — who needs Bob Dylan when you can just as effectively cover all the serious prob­lems of the world by "smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo"?); and the latest, trendiest, most cutting-edge achievement in the world of Western music was recognized as the Love Theme from The Sandpiper (ʽThe Shadow Of Your Smileʼ).

As much as we'd like to snicker on the issue, though, the era is not so remote yet as to become completely shrouded in myth — and yes, it is important to remember that there were many people in early 1966 who did live in that alternate universe; in fact, most people over 30, and plenty of those under, probably did. The problem with Brenda Lee was that most of those people, if they really needed the love theme from The Sandpiper, could just stick with the original, and usually did; there was little that Ms. Lee or her faceless, string-dependent backing band could add.

Amusingly, the only single from the album (which, formally, preceded it in late '65) was ʽRusty Bellsʼ, a lush ballad with a «message»: "Rusty bells, rusty bells, pity those who've gone astray, ring again and help them find the way" — nothing less than a socially conscious statement, so the people behind the lady must have felt some sort of tinkle, that, perhaps, in the era of ʽLike A Rolling Stoneʼ and ʽA Change Is Gonna Comeʼ, something is required from time to time even from the high priests of the schmaltz variety. It didn't work; the single stalled at No. 33 and mar­ked the next-to-last time any of Brenda's singles would get in the Top 40.

Other than that, the only salvageable tracks are: (a) an interesting jazzy take on ʽA Taste Of Honeyʼ, with powerful brass backing overriding the strings for once, and (b) a few decent takes on oldies — the title track and ʽWhat A Difference A Day Madeʼ show a bit of pensive depth that the saccharine-riddled «contemporary material» covers replace with shallow romantic glitz. In other words, this is where the superiority of the pre-war Songbook over the post-war Songbook is established quite transparently. Well, there must be some meaning to the process of relistening to these records more than fifty years on.

Black Dice: Beaches And Canyons

BLACK DICE: BEACHES AND CANYONS (2002)

1) Seabird; 2) Things Will Never Be The Same; 3) The Dream Is Going Down; 4) Endless Happiness; 5) Big Drop.

From Kraftwerk to Aphex Twin to Autechre to the Animal Collective, my attitude towards elec­tronic music of all kinds is relatively simple — give me a world that lies beyond my imagination, but feels real enough, and we'll be quite likely to share a connection. That is the way I like to review most of those electronica records, by trying to discriminate between those that live, breathe, and tell «wond'rous stories» from those that exist purely as meaningless agglomerations of sounds. However, for the most part, it is just my impressions — there is no telling if the artist in question truly intended this particular track to sound like «copulating refrigerators» or «nanites delousing their circuits».

With Black Dice, an experimental noise outfit from Brooklyn, run by brothers Bjorn and Eric Copeland, the situation is different. These guys actually started out as more of a hardcore outfit, gradually moving towards digital magic as their penchant for wildness and experimentation led them to worship at the altar of Merzbow and other similar acts. By the time they got around to recording their debut LP, with Aaron Warren on bass and Hisham Bharoocha on drums, they were completely past any «generic hardcore» stage imaginable — and yet, Beaches And Can­yons does not at all sound like your average «electronic» album. Perhaps I would rather say that it sounds like your above-average experimental album that simply happened to be made with electronic tools lying around. This certainly makes it different from people like Richard D. James, who normally eat transistors for breakfast and sleep on motherboards.

Anyway, there is little doubt in my mind that, when Black Dice set out to make an album, they really have it in their minds to construct an alternate universe. Alternate enough, that is, to be fascinating and intriguing, but not enough to be completely incompatible with aural impressions that we have of ours. They present a set of «sonic-scapes», rhythmically and harmonically orga­nized, but very natural sounding — diverse, meaningful, intentionally ugly when the time calls for it and quite pretty when it doesn't. In a way, they achieve here (at least, to my utmost satis­faction) the kind of effect that The Animal Collective were not able to achieve on their early re­cords — probably because they were too obsessed with the «anything goes» aesthetics, whereas Black Dice, as chaotic as their output may seem at first, are, in fact, highly disciplined, and take full responsibility for every twist and turn.

The titles occasionally help. ʽSeabirdʼ starts out with a series of coos, caws, bleeps, and scuffles that do actually resemble a scattered, but patterned flock of alien seagulls and other species — gradually increasing in density until they all begin to fly round in dizzying circles. Later on, birds are joined by humans in a cute sort of tribal dance — whether it is supposed to signify a peaceful union between all species, or the primordial hunter's joy at the perspective of some roast seabird, I have no idea, but it all sounds fun, anyway.

From there on, the Copelands move to a series of lengthier, noisier suites: ʽThings Will Never Be The Sameʼ puts you inside the promised «canyons», with spirits playing games on your senses through winds, echoes, animal noises, baby cries (for some reason) and, finally, a grating, high tension storm where you seem to be caught up in a sparkling electric booth, afraid to move an inch for fear of being immediately electrocuted. ʽThe Dream Is Going Downʼ does sound like a sonic impersonation of an acute, inescapable nightmare — ten minutes of sirens, confusion, waves of white noise, looped schizo screaming, like a ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ for organized people (same hellish atmosphere but without the jarring unpredictable transitions from one piece of the collage to another). ʽEndless Happinessʼ breaks up the nightmare and gets you back to the can­yons, with chimes and woodwinds providing the atmosphere — then replaced by no fewer than six minutes of waves breaking on the shore, as it happens on one of those «Nature Sounds» CDs. Finally, ʽBig Dropʼ brings back the sonic nightmare, although, frankly speaking, it feels some­what redundant: I am happy enough with the 43 minutes of the first four tracks, and count this further sixteen-minute reprise as a special bonus for those who could not get enough.

This is certainly not «music» in the usual sense of the word, but neither is it «noise», produced out of a simple wish to experiment and to shock. Perhaps it could all be described as «simplistic» experimentation, unburdened by excessive complexity and intellectualization. There may be dif­ferent ways to crack the code of Black Dice, but it is not a chess puzzle — it is quite easily acces­sible, and convertible to a fun experience, for, I believe, even the stupidest of us, provided we are at least capable of opening our minds a little bit. Rough around the edges, yes: some of the loops and cycles run a little longer than they should, and, on the whole, the Copelands seem like bright lads, able to easily come up with far more ideas than they have allocated for this record. But still a thumbs up all the way, even if, in retrospect, it now seems more like a teaser for even better things to come.

Check "Beaches & Canyons" (MP3) on Amazon

Beck: Sea Change

BECK: SEA CHANGE (2002)

1) Golden Age; 2) Paper Tiger; 3) Guess I'm Doing Fine; 4) Lonesome Tears; 5) Lost Cause; 6) End Of The Day; 7) It's All In Your Mind; 8) Round The Bend; 9) Already Dead; 10) Sunday Sun; 11) Little One; 12) Side Of The Road.

«The Breakup Album». Where would we be without the concept? No Blood On The Tracks, no Rumours, no Adele, no Aimee Mann... no Tunnel Of Love or Jagged Little Pill, either, but the overall number of «efficient» breakup albums that immediately spring to mind is still larger than the amount of breakup albums with an unlucky correlation of substance and form. (Even Jagged Little Pill could have been so much better with a different musical philosophy). Even today, when it is normal for breakups to come at a dime a dozen, they may be traumatic enough to sti­mulate great art — so keep on breaking up, all you great artists, and go on behaving like male chauvinist pigs (if you're male) or like victims of male chauvinist pigs (if you're female).

Much to Beck's honour, though, his breakup album is fairly chivalrous. Legend has it that he caught his fiancée cheating on him with another musician, and if so, it was fairly lucky for her that her fiancé was not a Bob Dylan or a Lindsey Buckingham: Beck's «breakup album» does not put any explicit or implicit blame on anybody. In fact, for a breakup album, there are surprisingly few oppositions of «me» and «you» — most of the time it's just about «me» and the state of total misery that the «me» is experiencing. One has to watch the lyrics very closely to even understand that this is an actual breakup album. Actually, «misery» is not even the right word — «emotional numbness» is more like it, or maybe «deep-frozen soul»: Beck's intent here is to convey the feeling of confused stun and sensual paralysis that he must have undergone, and, as far as my own sensory receptors tell me, the intent is carried out fine.

For hardcore fans of Beck's «party face», the release of Sea Change, his bleakest, moodiest, and most genuinely serious record to that point, must have been like a bucket of ice-cold water, coming right on the heels of the non-stop-rave of Mid­nite Vultures. That did not prevent the al­bum from selling almost as well — and, of course, the critical press had a gala feast, because there's nothing like a Serious Breakup Album to give the professionally paid reviewer an easy subject to knock off a few paragraphs or pages. There were also murmurs, though, in some circles, that Beck had exceeded his artistic limitations — that «Beck the goof» was a far more valid pro­position altogether than «Beck the introspective singer-songwriter», that he lacked the proper clout, talent, lyrical gift, melodic feel, etc., for this side of the business. Both of these schools of thought still persist to the current day — so whose side should we be on?

My answer would be fairly simple. The songs, as such, that Beck wrote for the occasion, seem relatively pedestrian to me. Had they been issued as a collection of acoustic demos (the way they actually were recorded by Beck originally), Sea Change would probably end up deadly dull and ultimately quite inadequate to its purpose. However, the collective weight of Beck's output to that point showed well enough that putting together basic chord sequences was never a forte of Mr. Hansen — he usually preferred to «borrow» these sequences from somewhere else and then fo­cus exclusively on the form in which they were presented, together with one or more other people whose presence in the studio was vital. So why would Sea Change be an exception?

The plain truth is that Sea Change is not an album by Beck Hansen, the aspiring «anti-folk» ar­tist. It is an album by «Beck», a revolving-door-style conglomeration that, for the occasion, consisted of such primary members as Beck Hansen — the songwriter and vocalist; Nigel Godrich — the engineer, mixer, and producer; and David Campbell — string arranger and conductor, whose cre­dits run the unbelievable gamut from Carole King's Tapestry to Aerosmith's ʽI Don't Want To Miss A Thingʼ (people who can cause either great good or great evil on a whim are so fascinating, don't you agree?). Oh, and, for that matter, David Campbell is also Beck Hansen's father, but we will try to ignore that fact, lest unhealthy suspicions of nepotism darken our feelings.

Let us now take a closer look at one of the album's best numbers — ʽPaper Tigerʼ. As an «origi­nal song», it does not even begin to make the grade, resting on standard blues patterns (you can probably name half a dozen songs from J. J. Cale alone that ride the same chords). Where it does make the grade is its dynamics — the awesome tension build-up that begins from the very first second. The song starts out with Beck's dark-shaded singing, accompanied by the rhythm section only, with a very prominent bass walk. At 0:29, the electric guitar marks its grand entry with a jarring siren wail, and ten seconds later, it is joined by incoming strings. From then on, nothing really matters — not the basic sequence, not the monotonous rhythm, not even Beck's grumble, all the way to the final "there's no road back to you" — nothing but the incredible «organized freedom» with which Smokey Hormel's guitar and Campbell's strings roam all over that territory. This ain't Hollywood, this ain't the Chicago Blues Festival. This is free-feeling, unpredictable, but also completely accessible instrumental work that makes me jaw drop, and then pick up again with each new swoop of those strings.

Godrich's and Campbell's ideas for the use of orchestration on this album have been frequently compared to Paul Buckmaster's work for classic era Elton John, and there are some clear parallels, but on ʽPaper Tigerʼ and several other works the influences go deeper — all the way to 1967, I'd say, and the psychedelic use of strings on Beatles albums: ʽWithin You Without Youʼ, in parti­cular, and ʽI Am The Walrusʼ (in fact, I'd be very much surprised if the rising string pattern in the coda of ʽLonesome Tearsʼ were not a direct carryover from the ʽWalrusʼ coda — only on ʽWal­rusʼ, the strings were being used to blow your mind, while here they are rather used to overwhelm your mind, and yes, there is a real difference). Other analogies are possible as well, but the com­mon invariant is always the same — these are anything but «generic» arrangements. These here strings have living voices, and they want you to hear them. I think I do.

And it's not all about the strings, either. ʽGolden Ageʼ, opening the album, has no strings — only guitars and keyboards. But Godrich puts them at such a distance from Beck's voice, and uses such effects, that it genuinely sounds as if the man is singing to you out of a huge dungeon pit, where he has placed himself in his desperation: the voice being picked up by the wind, thrown and thrashed about the pit walls, and finally reaching the listener at the intersection of several dif­ferent air currents. Radiohead fans forgive me — but I have never once experienced this sort of effect while listening to OK Computer, not even at top volume on headphones. And consequent­ly, Beck's "these days I barely get by, I don't even try", which, under different circumstances, might have sounded self-pitying and pretentious, achieves maximum effect — not so much self-pity as mere constatation of the fact, cast to the thousand winds, giving us a man overwhelmed by fate, feeling like a bit player, caught up against his will in some impossible-to-understand sce­na­rio and not finding the strength to fight it.

This is just two songs, but everything on here works, one way or another. Even the most mono­tonous, static, near-ambient tracks like ʽRound The Bendʼ — where Beck's mode of singing is (probably quite intentionally) emulating the late Nick Drake — are redeemed by powerful «deep sea» orchestration, with waves of violins and cellos carrying, rather than drowning out, Beck and his minimalistic acous­tic picking. But ʽRound The Bendʼ is not typical of the record: most of the songs are actual «songs» rather than sonic panoramas — it's just that their dynamics usually takes time to unwrap. ʽSunday Sunʼ, for instance, starts out as a keyboard-and-sitar-driven art-pop song, then finishes with a noisy crash for a coda — the loudest, most abrazing moment on the entire al­bum, yet such is its overall effect that you might not even notice all the rucus, so smoothly it is integrated in the overall calm melancholic grandeur of the song and the entire record.

If Sea Change is not Beck's «masterpiece», it is only because there are too many different Becks out there to choose just one, not to mention all the different «Beck configurations» (on this one here, the honor belongs to Godrich and Beck Sr. as much as Beck Jr.). But as far as breakup al­bums go — and just imagine how many of them there have been in the last fifty years — this one not only sets out a unique goal to be conquered, but also does conquer it. Did the man really feel that sort of emotional numbness upon being dumped? Is he that sensitive? Could he really have written "I'm mixing business with leather, Christmas with Heather" one day and then "these days I barely get by..." the next one? None of that, of course, is important. What is important is how the music makes you feel — and, on my part, Sea Change makes me feel... well, let's call it «cold and drunk», or something like that. But not drunk enough to be unable to hold those thumbs up for one of the decade's greatest artistic successes.

Check "Sea Change" (CD) on Amazon
Check "Sea Change" (MP3) on Amazon

The Bats: The Guilty Office

THE BATS: THE GUILTY OFFICE (2008)

1) Countersign; 2) Crimson Enemy; 3) Broken Path; 4) Like Water In Your Hands; 5) Castle Lights; 6) Two Lines; 7) Satellites; 8) Later On That Night; 9) Steppin' Out; 10) The I Specialist; 11) The Guilty Office; 12) The Orchard.

A little bit more rock-oriented than its predecessor, as if Scott himself had realized that At The National Grid took things way too far in the rock-a-bye-baby direction. More electric guitar, louder drums, and even a whole new fast-tempo song (ʽSteppin' Outʼ) ensure that The Guilty Of­fice does not really intend to put you in a stupefying trance — it honestly wants you to think of it as a collection of individual pop-rock songs. With that in mind, let us see how many autonomous, self-contained, and positively stunning tunes Scott has managed to come up with this time.

ʽBroken Pathʼ could be one, creating an atmosphere of moderately deep gloom with its network of clean jangly, dirty distorted, and wailing psychedelic guitars. ʽTwo Linesʼ could be another, but not because of any vocal hooks — its main point of attraction is the guitar vs. strings battle in the coda, a very straightforward one, where baroque chamber atmosphere is pitted against purple haze and we may want to pick a favorite. ʽSteppin' Outʼ is not only fast, but brings back the idea of the «Moody Melancholic Melody» that the lead guitar plays in tandem with the rhythm strum, best represented on Couchmaster.

And this is pretty much it: even these particular descriptions are piss-poor, and the rest of the songs is thoroughly undescribable in layman terms. At this point, even switching from acoustic to electric guitars for volume, sharpness, and energy considerations does not help — the songs lack distinctiveness and may only be appreciated for the general style. I have nothing further to say.

Check "The Guilty Office" (CD) on Amazon
Check "The Guilty Office" (MP3) on Amazon

Be-Bop Deluxe: Modern Music

BE-BOP DELUXE: MODERN MUSIC (1976)

1) Orphans Of Babylon; 2) Twilight Capers; 3) Kiss Of Light; 4) The Bird Charmers Destiny; 5) The Gold At The End Of My Rainbow; 6) Bring Back The Spark; 7) Modern Music; 8) Dancing In The Moonlight (All Alone); 9) Honeymoon On Mars; 10) Lost In The Neon World; 11) Dance Of The Uncle Sam Humanoids; 12) Modern Music (reprise); 13) Forbidden Lovers; 14) Down On Terminal Street; 15) Make The Music Magic.

Even more disciplined and «song-oriented» than Sunburst Finish — although one needn't get any false ideas about shifting the overall style by simply looking at the album cover: suits and ties they may be sporting, but the hair is still fairly long, and even the word «modern» in the album title does not necessarily mean «New Wave», «punk», «reggae», «electronica», etc. For now, only one concession is being made, albeit a serious one: Modern Music shows serious quotas introduced on «guitar wizardry». For the first time ever, Nelson intentionally refuses to stretch out with heroic solo passages on any of the tracks — which is why most of them are so unusually short — and concentrates on songwriting and atmosphere rather than dazzling technique.

In fact, he might even be concentrating a bit too hard. The final version of the record has 15 tracks instead of the usual 10, and, although some of these are represented by very brief musical «links», the general feeling is that there is too much going on. Some of the songs are genuinely meaningful and evocative, but on the whole, Nelson is not a master songwriter, and when he sud­denly sets himself this challenge — to generate as many songwriting ideas as possible per one LP — it is probably inevitable that a large fraction of these ideas will not work, and those that will may get lost in the forest. And when I say «forest» with a negative connotation, I mean tracks like ʽHoney­moon On Marsʼ: big, pompous, Ziggy Stardust-age compositions, all echo and phasing and anthemic vocals and little in the way of interesting melodic concept. Unfortunately, there is a lot of such stuff here, and it has nothing to do with suits and ties, in fact, it almost sounds nostal­gic in the context of 1976.

On the other hand, this is the album that also gave us ʽKiss Of Lightʼ — a conscious attempt, I think, at recreating the success of ʽSister Seagullʼ, since both songs are driven by a major hook in the form of a screechy, high-pitched guitar riff, and both are among the decade's finest brand of «burly romantic» arena-rock anthems, combining crowdpleasing potential with intelligence and craft. On paper, a crude start like "the woman of moon flew into my room last night" might make one cringe, but put it together with Bill's tricky shuffling of thick distorted riffage and liltingly clean melodic lines — and it works. Maybe because underneath all that romance, as the guitar and the vocals suggest, lies a thick layer of irony.

It is also not true that the pomp is never enjoyable. On ʽThe Gold At The End Of My Rainbowʼ, it most certainly is, since the anthemic chorus is so elegantly and conclusively shaped — and the song becomes a credible power ballad even without the power of the guitar solo. But in general, the most interesting moments of Modern Music are those where Nelson strays the farthest away from the already well-known formula: for instance, on the funk oddity ʽDance Of The Uncle Sam Humanoidsʼ, which, according to its title, should be about something anti-American, but, since it's instrumental, who can really tell (unless the occasional sound effects such as bullets whistling over your head count as implicit condemnations of Yankee violence). Or on ʽTwilight Capersʼ which, for no obvious reason, quotes the Dragnet theme out of the blue. Or on the title track which opens with a series of radio noises — including the listener tuning in, out of sheer accident, of course, on ʽAxe Victimʼ and ʽSister Seagullʼ — before turning into the album's most senti­mental number, almost a prayer to the power of music on the radiowaves.

Actually, ʽModern Musicʼ is not entirely self-contained, but rather acts as an introduction (and, later on, as a reprised coda) to an Abbey Road-style futuristic mini-suite — the one that includes both boring (ʽHoneymoon On  Marsʼ) and exciting (ʽUncle Sam Humanoidsʼ) parts. Presenting it all as «modern music» seems like a funny miscalculation: futuristic it may be in spirit, but on the whole, it is still way more old-school glam-rock than a foresight of the radically new things to come. But the idea of transition from lengthy, drawn-out space jams to these economic snippets, where Nelson's guitar forms the backbone of the song, but leaves out the fireworks, might be such a foresight — as if putting on that suit and tie was a symbolic gesture that also surmised imposing limits on Nelson's «sonic ego».

The bottomline is — it all depends on whether you have more love and respect for Bill as a player or for Bill as a songwriter. If one of your favorite Be-Bop Deluxe songs is ʽNo Trains To Heavenʼ, you will need to come to terms with Modern Music, and live with the fact that the end of 1976 was marked by imposing a heavy tax on guitar pyrotechnics. If, however, going against the grain of mainstream criticism, you find Nelson to be a great master of melody, Modern Music has every chance of becoming your favorite Be-Bop Deluxe album — good melodies or bad melodies, there is a lot of them here, and the old spirit, perhaps not as freely roaming as before, is still largely intact. Anyway, a thumbs up is still well guaranteed.

Check "Modern Music" (CD) on Amazon
Check "Modern Music" (MP3) on Amazon

Blood, Sweat & Tears: More Than Ever

BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS: MORE THAN EVER (1976)

1) They; 2) I Love You More Than Ever; 3) Katy Bell; 4) Sweet Sadie The Savior; 5) Hollywood; 6) You're The One; 7) Heavy Blue; 8) Saved By The Grace Of Your Love.

Curious, yes, but as late as late 1976, the band was somehow still holding up. As rhythm & blues, black and white alike, was steering ever closer to sterilized disco standards, and men were co­ming to terms with beginning to sound like machines rather than human beings, there are practi­cally no signs of catastrophe on More Than Ever — yes, at the expense of sounding way too old-fashioned, Blood, Sweat & Tears make an album here whose reputation a couple of decades or so past its original release must have inevitably exceeded the «warmth» of the initial reception (when the record stalled at #165, and was used as an excuse by Columbia to drop the band from its roster — not that the label itself didn't have a hand in this failure).

Anyway, more than anything else, More Than Ever takes its cue from the peak years of Stevie Wonder — with plenty of funky clavinet, brass fanfares à la ʽSuperstitionʼ, «ominous», socially acute, R&B, and excursions into gospel soul territory. Almost half of the album is self-penned, and the other half is allocated for relatively obscure covers, sometimes provided by guest players (e. g. ʽSweet Sadie The Saviorʼ, credited to Patti Austin, who took part in the sessions as backup vocalist). There is very little here that could be even remotely called «daring» or «experimental», but the songs are written and recorded with care, and, most importantly, with enough obvious love for the purely musical side of the business.

Occasionally, there are tasteless missteps. ʽHollywoodʼ, a glitzy dance-funk number that, out of everything on here, moves the closest to disco, was probably intended as a tongue-in-cheek self-paro­dy — the band sending up their own image of «prisoners of Las Vegas / Beverly Hills» — but it is not funny enough to be perceived as a purely comic number, and so, the ecstatic chants of "Hollywood! Hollywood! I think we're gonna be here a while!.." can easily come across as silly pandering rather than self-irony.

The big, bulky, gospelish ballads are also a problem. ʽI Love You More Than Everʼ, despite not being written by any of the band members, is entitled way too similar to ʽI Love You More Than You'll Ever Knowʼ to suggest sheer coincidence — and invokes unfavorable comparisons, since this here song is just a sentimental, hyper-orchestrated love ballad. The oboe part from guest star Sid Weinberg is a useful bit of peaceful pastoralism to draw attention away from the corny string arrangements, but it is still not enough to push the song into «artsy baroque» territory. In the end, it's just another sappy love hymn, suffering from excessive weight. ʽSaved By The Grace Of Your Loveʼ, closing out the album, suffers from the same, and this time, it does not even have any oboes for partial redemption. But at least they both give it an honest try.

A little more adequacy seems to be present in the tougher numbers. ʽTheyʼ is a funk / fusion ve­hicle that seems to grumble against organized religion, but, most importantly, has several instru­mental passages that dispense with predictability — guitars, brass, vibraphones, and the rhythm section move around in semi-free-form mode, groping for ideas, and generate a few minutes of thoroughly anti-commercial controlled chaos à la Zappa, which, furthermore, fits very well the overall confused / angry mood of the song. The funky instrumental ʽHeavy Blueʼ, in comparison, never tries to move into previously uncharted territory, but it does establish a moderately cool proto-disco groove — delightfully integrating all of the band's varied instrumentation to capture the now-dated, but then-resonant stylishness of the decade without sacrificing the musician.

The rest of the songs do not deserve much commentary, but, as usual, none of them are awful — in fact, beyond the unlucky corniness of ʽHollywoodʼ, there is nothing on More Than Ever that would significantly challenge good taste: «generic decent album» would be closer to the truth than «generic failure». Why they decided to release ʽYou're The Oneʼ, one of the better ballads from the set, as the lead single instead of the much more hard-hitting ʽTheyʼ is anybody's guess — probably deemed ʽTheyʼ too adventurous for the masses, or hoped for yet another ʽYou've Made Me So Very Happyʼ — but on the whole, of course, their stubborn clinging to the old style was commercially doomed from the start. However, that is no reason to dismiss the record today without giving it a chance: it remains perfectly listenable, and deserves an unethusiastic, but honest thumbs up.

Check "More Than Ever" (CD) on Amazon

Bob Dylan: Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid

BOB DYLAN: PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID (1973)

1) Main Title Theme (Billy); 2) Cantina Theme (Workin' For The Law); 3) Billy 1; 4) Bunkhouse Theme; 5) River Theme; 6) Turkey Chase; 7) Knockin' On Heaven's Door; 8) Final Theme; 9) Billy 4; 10) Billy 7.

Intermission. Other than a brief three-day recording session in March 1971, which yielded ʽWat­ching The River Flowʼ and the «canonical» version of ʽWhen I Paint My Masterpieceʼ, there was little musical activity on Bob's part for almost four years. Somewhere in this gap, lost and gene­rally overlooked — well, as far as one can «overlook» anything associated with a giant of Bob's stature — was this soundtrack, which the man generated for the Sam Peckinpah movie of the same name, in which he also played a brief, but curious, supporting part.

Although few critics would probably list Pat Garrett as a Peckinpah masterpiece (nothing beats The Wild Bunch, right?), it still has to be one of the most dead-on collaborations between a ma­jor movie figure and a major musical figure in history. Peckinpah was pretty wasted by the time it came to realizing his next project; Dylan was in comparatively better shape, but still a long way from inner peace and comfort, insecure about his musical future and facing family trouble on the horizon. Peckinpah was making a movie about «the end of the Old West» as we know it, and Dylan had lightly scratched that issue, too, on John Wesley Harding, although the album wasn't about that topic in general. Peckinpah put Dylan in the movie, gave him the name «Alias», and pretty much nailed his essence by providing him with the most bizarre scene in the film (the one where «Alias» is forced to move behind the bar counter and read all the labels on cans of beans and tomatoes — am I the only one to see the hilarious parallels between this and this?). In return, Dylan gave Peckinpah some of the most broody, somber, unsettling, and, occasionally, cathartic music he'd ever written.

The obvious bane of the soundtrack album is that it is not only way too short, but also way too repetitive and «padded out» to count as a properly offered record of new original music. No less than four of the tracks are set to the same melody (the three different ʽBillysʼ and the instrumen­tal ʽTitle Themeʼ), and, in between them, cover about a half of the album's running length. Of the re­maining half, only ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ counts as a fully self-contained song, melody, lyrics, significance, and everything; the others are instrumentals, varying in purpose and quality. Essentially, the album is a movie soundtrack, never aspiring to anything more, and it wasn't even as if Bob had any incentive to write a lot of music for the movie — the first impression is that of a quick toss-off, with neither the acting part nor the writing part helping to make the man feel happy or satisfied.

That said, even a proverbial «toss-off» like that from Dylan still in his prime (or, more accurately speaking, on the threshold of his «Silver Age») may contain its fair share of gold nuggets. For one thing, the backing band assembled for the sessions was a mega-nugget on its own: Roger McGuinn and old pal Bruce Langhorne on guitars, Booker T. Jones on bass, Jim Keltner on drums, fiddler-extraordinaire Byron Berline, and brass/woodwinds-pro Gary Foster — Dylan's usual knack for getting varied, but amazingly well compatible teams working again. The combi­nation is so perfectly set that even the six-minute repetitive acoustic jam of ʽTitle Themeʼ is ulti­mately quite addictive — they just repeat the same instrumental folk-blues verse over and over and over, but with enough nuances to keep it interesting (and when you are tired of savoring the acoustic guitars, turn your attention to Booker T.'s bass parts: the man is actually being quite funky in places).

ʽCantina Themeʼ, ʽBunkhouse Themeʼ, and ʽRiver Themeʼ all seem to be centered on the general atmosphere of the dreamy, relaxed laziness in a hot New Mexican framework — their slow tem­pos and somewhat rambling guitar arrangements also diminish the album's initial impact, but with time, the laziness acquires its properly mystical character, a sort of «desert Taoism» that only the best directors of Westerns could capture — and only the best soundtrack composers. The ninety seconds of ʽRiver Themeʼ are especially captivating. Monotonous, yes, but so is the river.

The real «meat» of the soundtrack, I think, begins with ʽTurkey Chaseʼ and covers the next two songs as well. ʽTurkey Chaseʼ may have begun life as a realistic accompaniment to an actual turkey chase (fast tempo, aggressive style of playing, and the banjo does a good job of imperso­nating an actual turkey), but the frantic fiddle part from Byron Berline makes it more like a life-and-death chase (well, I guess it was, from the turkey's point of view), being, simply put, one of the most stunning country fiddle melodies I've ever heard in my life — seeing as how we are nor­mally accustomed to «friendly» or «funny» fiddle melodies in the genre, this one, by contrast, is a deeply tragic impersonation of a restless hunted soul, forced on the run for eternity. Possibly the greatest musical ode to a turkey ever written — never mind that the word «turkey» by itself pro­duces a funny effect, just have a listen for yourself.

Still, Berline's three minutes of glory on the album are easily outperformed by Gary Foster on ʽFinal Themeʼ — here featuring what is probably my favorite recorder part in all popular music. ʽFinal Themeʼ builds on the base chord sequence of ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ — for the first thirty seconds, it seems as if this is simply going to be an instrumental version, but from the mo­ment Gary's recorder part comes in, it fully compels the listener's attention, and not just the lis­tener's: drummer Jim Keltner, for instance, seems totally hooked on the playing, following Foster's melody in all of its rises and falls, and so do the gospel-styled backing vocals. Little sur­prise about that: it uses a bare minimum of tone changes to cover the entire palette of human emotions — every several bars, the mood goes from sadness / depression / tragedy to joy / re­la­xa­tion / redemption, before, finally, the instrument gets stuck in a small coda loop of ultimate paci­fication and coming to terms with the world. Further words just fail me.

In the middle of this great battle between the master fiddler, who gets the silver, and the master woodwinder, who gets the gold, sits ʽKnockin' On Heaven's Doorʼ, the first and unquestionably the best of Dylan's intrusions into the field of gospel music. Later recast by Clapton as a reggae number, with Bob picking up on the rearrangement and generally performing it that way in con­cert, it is still at its most impressive here, backed with all the proper, somber "ooh-oohs", funereal organs, and a slow, steady beat, rather than the reggae pulse that cannot help but transform the song into a dance number — which it probably shouldn't be. (Actually, I think one reason why Bob eventually switched to the reggae version was that he might have found the original too heavy and seri­ous for his cliché-free image). But it should also be noted that, for all of its sub­sequent fame, the song works par­ticularly well in the context of the original movie — this is when you really get to feel this somberness and heaviness as almost physical heaviness, pressing down on the protagonist: the "mama, put my guns in the ground / I can't shoot them anymore" bit is central to the general idea of Pat Garrett, and the song is not so much a generic anti-war / anti-violence song as a personal complaint against the wearisome side effects that complete freedom from everything, including law and morale, brings on to people.

So, as you can see, there is not one single reason on Earth to sidestep Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid while exploring the different faces of Bob Dylan. It may be debated to what extent the ins­trumental numbers are really «Dylan» (although, formally, he is credited as the only songwriter), but we should remember that «Dylan music» was never limited to «Dylan songwriting» and «Dy­lan singing» — time and time over again, it was also about getting all the right people in the right place at the right time, getting them in the right mood to produce great music, and knowing when to start, when to stop, and what to select for the final take. And from that point of view, this soundtrack is as quintessentially «Dylan» as everything else — and its thumbs up here means «even if this is to be your last Dylan acquisition, there is no reason why it should be the least».

Check "Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid" (CD) on Amazon

Brenda Lee: Too Many Rivers

BRENDA LEE: TOO MANY RIVERS (1965)

1) It's Not Unusual; 2) Call Me Irresponsible; 3) Too Many Rivers; 4) Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me); 5) Whispering; 6) Stormy Weather; 7) Hello Dolly; 8) Unforgettable; 9) Everybody Loves Somebody; 10) No One; 11) Truer Than True; 12) Think.

Country songwriter Harlan Howard provided Brenda with the hit for this album — the title track rose to No. 13 on the charts, her highest achievement since ʽAs Usualʼ two years before. As far as generic country balladry goes, ʽToo Many Riversʼ is hardly the worst kind: if only they'd thought of a better set of clothes for the song than the usual lush strings and cloudy aah-oohs... but the days of curiosities in guitar, sax, and keyboard arrangements were long gone by then. Still, a rockin'-horse country song for a hit is always better than a glob of syrup.

Other than that, let's see: Tom Jones... Judy Garland... Shirley Bassey... Nat King Cole... Dean Martin... Hello Dolly... a couple pre-war standards... well, you get the gist. And you do know that you are in general trouble listening to Brenda's mid-1960s albums, and in double trouble when ʽHello Dollyʼ turns out to be one of the highlights — but somehow, done in a fast tempo, rock-and-roll style, oddly enough, it is (at least, I'd certainly take it over Streisand, but then again, I'd take almost anything over Streisand, so forget it).

But altogether, if the previous two albums might seem like the last twists and twitches of agony, curious to watch from a sadistic perspective, this one is rigor mortis setting in — Vegas stuff, regurgitation of the «Songbook», schmaltz and glitz all the way. No doubt, somewhere in the world there may hide a genuinely devoted fan or two, or three, that could secretly wish for a complete set of Songbooks from Brenda Lee the way we got them from Ella — then again, there might also be some people out there who'd like their refrigerators to play their CDs, and their CD players to press their pants. What Brenda does on this, and many other, records, is not fundamen­tally different, and deserves nothing other than yet another thumbs down — although stealing the title track and ʽHello Dollyʼ for your playlist would be a merciful gesture.

Beachwood Sparks: The Tarnished Gold

BEACHWOOD SPARKS: THE TARNISHED GOLD (2012)

1) Forget The Song; 2) Sparks Fly Again; 3) Mollusk; 4) Tarnished Gold; 5) Water From The Well; 6) Talk About Lonesome; 7) Leave That Light On; 8) Nature's Light; 9) No Queremos Oro; 10) Earl Jean; 11) Alone Together; 12) The Orange Grass Special; 13) Goodbye.

With the kind of fame that Beachwood Sparks had been able to earn (each of their albums has amassed from 10 to 20 customer reviews on Amazon, to give a rough picture), one might get a little puzzled about why this band felt the need to get back together under the same old name, ten years after they'd all dissipated to test out various alternate projects. A «Pink Floyd reunion» or a «Fleetwood Mac reunion» or an «Eagles reunion» — that kind of makes sense, whatever the ac­tual results might be, but a «Beachwood Sparks reunion» just sounds weird.

However, just one listen to The Tarnished Gold, the band's third album, is enough to set things straight. This is not a reunion because the band never really felt apart. What they did was take their own advice and go back to a tree-like state — that way, no matter how long the breaks be­tween albums, time stands absolutely still, and the next one picks up where the last one left off even if the tectonic plates themselves had relocated in the meantime. There is only one problem: the more time you spend standing still, the deeper your roots sink into the ground, and thus, ten years of phantom existence resulted in the band's third album becoming their dreamiest — nay, their most lethargic — creation thus far.

With the exception of maybe just one or two mid-tempo soft country-rockers, and a highly artifi­cial and unfunny excursion into Latin territory (ʽNo Queremos Oroʼ), all of these songs are slow, atmospheric, brooding segments of psycho-folk, and all of them could be roughly described as spiritual variations on the theme of ʽConfusion Is Nothing Newʼ. Except that there is neither any confusion here, nor anything new — the Sparks still place their trust in tender, caressing mixes of acoustic guitars, echoey slide leads, retro-sounding keyboard tapestries in the background, and hushed, relaxating vocal harmonies. No individual part of this sound is ever great by itself, and when they are all merged together, The Tarnished Gold is, at best, a pleasing, instantaneously forgettable lullaby. Listen to it every evening, seven days in a row, and by the end of the test period you will probably not be able to remember a single song — but you just might get a week of heal­thy, eco-friendly sleep.

Where this album fails, as far as I see it, is in its goal to generate transcendental magic — the very goal to which everything else, like lively tempos and catchy melodies, is sacrificed without mercy. In ten years, Beachwood Sparks have not managed to pick up any new tricks: they think that their three cherished muses — Echo, Repetition, and Tenderness — will somehow do the job for them. But, like all responsible muses, all these three can offer is a helping hand — they cannot teach the band to learn new chords or implement original instrumentation. Hence, another dis­appointed thumbs down. Put it this way: good taste may be a virtue, but who needs good taste if there's nothing on the horizon to be tasted?

Check "The Tarnished Gold" (CD) on Amazon
Check "The Tarnished Gold" (MP3) on Amazon

Beck: Midnite Vultures

BECK: MIDNITE VULTURES (1999)

1) Sexx Laws; 2) Nicotine & Gravy; 3) Mixed Bizness; 4) Get Real Paid; 5) Hollywood Freaks; 6) Peaches And Cream; 7) Broken Train; 8) Milk And Honey; 9) Beautiful Way; 10) Pressure Zone; 11) Debra.

With the dark brooding of Mutations out of the way, it's back to swing time again. A spin of the wheel, and Nigel Godrich disappears in smoke — don't worry, he will be back — as The Dust Brothers make a triumphant re-entry. This time, Beck's ambition is to make the party album to outparty all the other party albums. The samples are back, in a modest way, but for the most part, it's all about the beats, the hooks, and the arrogant, cynical, super-cool party spirit: Midnite Vul­tures is flashy, hot, and ultimately meaningless — but, like the best of those party albums, it's got enough witty, funny cynicism to it so as not to repulse the demanding listener.

Pretty much every song on here is fun in one way or another. They may not be deeply impressive (few «party albums» are deeply impressive in the first place, for obvious reasons), but Beck is not aiming for that — he claims to have perfectly mastered the art of, let's call it, «expensive cheap thrills», puncturing the listener's senses on a primal level without offending the brain. It's all a bunch of musical sexual acts, but, as he states himself on the very first track, "I want to defy the logic of all sex laws — let the handcuffs slip off your wrists". Midnite Vultures does have its logic, but it is its own logic indeed, not anybody else's.

I honestly have no idea of how many elements on the album come from Beck's own head, and how many have been taken from other places (but still reshuffled and re-glued in Beck's own head all the same). Direct influences that everyone mentions range from Prince to Grandmaster Flash to David Bowie to Kraftwerk to the Velvet Underground, and that is not mentioning minor touches like echoes of Elton John on the coda of ʽDebraʼ, or the occasional Beatlisms, or the occasional country touch here and there. In addition, some of the songs show that Beck had de­veloped a fairly impressive falsetto technique — and that, whenever he sings falsetto, he sounds eerily similar to Mick Jagger (just compare ʽDebraʼ with, let's say, ʽWorried About Youʼ). But none of that is ever a problem, because the important thing is to know how to steal, what to steal, and when to steal, and if Odelay could still be accused of an occasional abuse of power here and there, Midnite Vultures is a perfectly woven tapestry. If anything, one could perhaps shed a lo­nely tear for the pre-war blues strain — hopelessly lost in the fray this time. But at least the word "garbage" is still prominently featured in the lyrics (ʽPeaches And Creamʼ forms a delicious rhyme with "you make a gar­bage man steam", don't you think?).

On a song-by-song level, there are no highlights or lowlights, but, on a whim, I would particular­ly mention ʽMixed Biznessʼ as the «the shit» element of the album — certainly this sort of groove, democratically generated by guitars, brass, and vocals jumping from speaker to speaker, is as good as anything Prince ever had to offer, not to mention just as «mock-dangerous» ("I'm mixing business with leather", Beck tells us from the outset, even though the music itself contains no hints at a BDSM attitude — cybersex, perhaps, given the huge amount of electronic bleeps, but nothing that would suggest any glorification of physical pain). Then again, ʽGet Real Paidʼ might be even more fun — an almost completely electronic brouhaha that might sound like a dialog be­tween two androgynous robots in heat at first ("Teletubbies going electric", Beck used to say himself), before you understand that the lyrics are also poking fun at la dolce vita à la 1990s ("we like to ride on executive planes, we like to sit around and get real paid").

As the album moves on, though, the tracks get a little less beat-oriented and become ever more interesting in terms of melody and musical effects — for instance, the insane slides and bends on ʽPeaches And Creamʼ that make the song seem like Animal Farm Gone Berserk; or the psyche­delic vocal modulation ("we're out of controo-ool...") on ʽBroken Trainʼ, once again reviving the spirit of 1966; or the entirety of ʽBeautiful Wayʼ, reportedly inspired by The Velvet Underground and certainly consistent with the spirit of Loaded — slow-moving, steady, the only track on the album that moves away from head-spinning electrofunk, trip-hop, etc., but am I ever glad it's there even despite not fitting into the general atmosphere.

By the time we get to the «sentimental» coda of ʽDebraʼ, Vultures have already been long since balancing on the edge of parody, but ʽDebraʼ is probably the only time on the album where Beck officially makes that move — the absurdly exaggerated falsetto, the lyrics ("I met you at JC Penny, I think your nametag said Jenny..."), the exuberant brass arrangement, always happy to oblige with a mock-build-up, all of it reads like a final gesture: «Oh, by the way, if any of you here were going to take any of this stuff seriously, here's a final firm reminder to drop it». But as a good-natured parody on classic soul material, ʽDebraʼ is hilarious anyway, and a memorable and atmospheric conclusion, carefully wrapping up a non-stop-rave experience with some sit-back-and-relax laughter.

Of all of Beck's major label records, Midnite Vultures is probably the most «trashy», but even its title forewarns you of that — what else is to be expected from an album about «vultures»? For the most part, it's all about form, not substance, but this here is Beck at the peak of his «formal» abilities, so much so that the songs, despite being so steeply soaked in late-1990s technologies, sound as exciting and baffling in the next millennium. They really do make a garbage man steam, not to mention, more prosaically, thumbs up all the way.

Check "Midnite Vultures" (CD) on Amazon
Check "Midnite Vultures" (MP3) on Amazon

The Bats: At The National Grid

THE BATS: AT THE NATIONAL GRID (2005)

1) Western Isles; 2) Horizon; 3) Hubert; 4) Bells; 5) Single File; 6) Pre War Blues; 7) The Rays; 8) Things; 9) Mir; 10) Up To The Sky; 11) We Do Not Kick; 12) Flowers & Trees; 13*) Untitled.

Ten years later, The Bats are back to conquer the third millennium. But do they make any con­cessions? Do they even attempt to recognize how much has changed? Naturally they do not, or else the would not be The Bats. At The National Grid does not sound exactly the same way as Daddy's Highway, but if there are any differences in sound, they sure as heck ain't due to no sissy changes in musical trends and fashions. The Bats love their folk rock, and they couldn't care less about trends and fashions, and that obstinacy deserves respect — unless it comes from stupi­dity and lack of talent, which is not something Robert Scott could be easily accused of.

There is some bad news, though. With age, The Bats seem to have seriously mellowed out — not that they ever subscribed to the «rock'n'roll» idiom in the first place, but they did have a knack for  solid, steady beats and sharply focused electric jangle. At The National Grid opens with ʽWes­tern Islesʼ, a pretty, but highly fragile-sounding piece — acoustic guitars picked by elves, vocals contributed by hobbits, background vocals added by sylphids. Add the predictably monotonous mood (no dynamics or development whatsoever throughout the song's three minutes), and that essentially leaves you with three choices: (a) imagine yourself as a fairy, (b) plunge into deep sleep, (c) fail to notice that something was just played from your speakers in the first place.

The soporific effect is tentatively rectified already on the next track — ʽHorizonʼ adds drums, jangly rhythm guitar, and a distorted psychedelic lead guitar part. But «tentatively» is the key word, because the song is still essentially a drone (instrumentally) and a hum (vocally), the only difference from «shoegazing» lying in its fast tempo — yet whoever said that it is impossible to shoegaze with some acceleration? The whole point of this song, and this whole album, is in its at­mosphere and attitude.

Construction-wise, National Grid picks up exactly where Couchmaster left off — it, too, has a few of those brief instrumental interludes, usually consisting of one or two simple musical phra­ses locked in a trance-oriented cycle (ʽHubertʼ; ʽWe Do Not Kickʼ), that have no major purpose other than humbly introducing themselves to you. Hello, we are the interludes, we have no idea what we are doing here, they probably just forgot to add vocals to us, but you know, it was nice meeting you all the same, hope you have a good time out there.

But melody-wise, the album is not that strong because it has no such intention. The evocative lead lines of Couchmaster, such as the one that made ʽAfternoon In Bedʼ such a cute little clas­sic, are nowhere to be found — everything is melted down to acoustic strum and electric droning, with the vocals (particularly Kaye Woodward's sleepwalking performance on ʽMirʼ) floating on essentially the same frequencies all the way through. The atmosphere, as could be expected, is tasteful and friendly enough so as not to stimulate any thumbs down — in the end, The Bats are simply too good at their formula to ever make a truly bad record — but really, the album is only for diehard fanatics of this style.

Check "At The National Grid" (CD) on Amazon
Check "At The National Grid" (MP3) on Amazon

Be-Bop Deluxe: Sunburst Finish

BE-BOP DELUXE: SUNBURST FINISH (1976)

1) Fair Exchange; 2) Heavenly Homes; 3) Ships In The Night; 4) Crying To The Sky; 5) Sleep That Burns; 6) Beauty Secrets; 7) Life In The Air Age; 8) Like An Old Blues; 9) Crystal Gazing; 10) Blazing Apostles.

Turning temporary session player Andy Clark into the band's resident keyboard master was pro­bably not the main reason why Sunburst Finish might look like a serious improvement over the «sophomore slump». After all, he is never credited for any songwriting, nor is he some sort of Rick Wakeman, capable of adding exciting (if not always meaningful) passages to melodically unexciting compositions. On the other hand, fleshing the band out with an additional layer of sound could somehow have brought about a more disciplined approach to songwriting... well, the point is, Sunburst Finish is a little less about virtuoso guitar playing than Axe Victim, and a little more about meaningful hooks than Futurama. In other words, all the three albums of Be-Bop Deluxe's «glam» period are similar, yet all are also different.

Although ʽFair Exchangeʼ opens the record with feedback blasts, these are quickly replaced by quite modern-sounding synthesizer patterns — inspired, one might add, not so much by the robo­tic fantasies of Kraftwerk as by the idealistic pulsations of Who's Next: modern they might be, but the New Wave penchant for «refrigerator electronica» had not yet caught up with Nelson by that particular point in time. In fact, electronic pulses soon give way to good old-fashioned rock and roll guitars (playing a riff akin to AC/DC's ʽHigh Voltageʼ), enhanced with a grand piano sound that seemes to show Roy Bittan's influence. Bruce Springsteen meets the Young brothers — hey, that could actually work, and on ʽFair Exchangeʼ, it does. As is often the case, it is hard to get what the song is about, but it is definitely about somebody's highbrowed anger, and the riffs, solos, and keyboard enhancements are all in agreement on that.

However, Nelson is willing to compromise his artistic integrity even further: ʽShips In The Nightʼ, released as the «commercially oriented» single from the album, is basically a ska song, tripped up and decorated with artsy passages, but, in the end, with an overall message that is hardly much different from that of ʽOb-La-Di Ob-La-Daʼ: "Without love, we are like ships in the night, selling our souls down the river", sung to a boppy, cheery pattern. There is not that much guitar on the song at all — it is primarily driven by the rhythm section and the keyboards, culminating in a «mock-sax» electronic solo that almost puts the song in campy parody territory. Who knows, maybe it was a parody — Nelson's ironic take on a «commercial» tune that paid off very well, since the song became Be-Bop Deluxe's highest point on the charts. But I think that it must only have soured Bill's impression of the true meaning of «chart life» even further.

That said, ʽShips In The Nightʼ is hardly the best choice to convey the general spirit of the album. Such a choice could, for instance, be ʽSleep That Burnsʼ, an ambitious chunk of composing that rolls through hard-rocking choo-choo sections, music hall extravaganzas, psychedelic interludes with backwards solos, and finally explodes after a massive guitar/keyboard build-up in the coda. And it does have a catchy chorus behind all that, despite its primary goal of conveying an atmo­sphere of hyperactive personal torment: the «sleep that burns» in question is of a kind that causes the patient to chuck his TV out of the window rather than pop pills and moonwalk. Emphasis is always on burning, not on sleeping (or not sleeping).

Or it could be Nelson's equivalent of the power ballad spot — ʽHeavenly Homesʼ, an inspiring mix of romantic piano, acoustic guitar, and glam riffs that, once again, sounds like an arithmetic mean between Bowie and Hammill, but grander than the former and more «song-like» than the latter. For all his irony and cynicism, Nelson has nothing against the old heart-on-sleeve trick from time to time, except that he never forgets to back it up with a return to harsh reality — ʽHea­venly Homesʼ joyfully flutters past the stars for several minutes before smashing, full speed, into the hardbodied asteroid of the "Heavenly homes... are hard to find..." chorus, set to a variation on Pink Floyd's descending/ascending ʽEchoesʼ riff for a sharp doom-laden effect.

Since most of the songs are marinated in the same musical and lyrical idiom, it makes little sense to comment on all of them: chances are that if you like one, you'll like the rest as well, so a thumbs up is quite imminent. But note that it also makes sense to hunt for the CD reissue, which adds three interesting bonus tracks: an almost totally instrumental psycho-funk jam (ʽShineʼ), a dark romantic ballad with a surprisingly tender and introspective underbelly (ʽSpeed Of The Windʼ), and a slow dance-style B-side with a psychedelic guitar/synth duet (ʽBlue As A Jewelʼ) — all three are curious in their own ways, and all three are quite different from the average style of the album itself.

Check "Sunburst Finish" (CD) on Amazon
Check "Sunburst Finish" (MP3) on Amazon

Blood, Sweat & Tears: In Concert

BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS: IN CONCERT (1976)

1) Spinning Wheel; 2) I Love You More Than You'll Ever Know; 3) Lucretia MacEvil; 4) And When I Die; 5) One Room Country Shack; 6) And When I Die (reprise); 7) (I Can Recall) Spain; 8) Hi-De-Ho; 9) Unit Seven; 10) Life; 11) Mean Ole World; 12) Ride Captain Ride; 13) You've Made Me So Very Happy.

Well, at least they had the good sense to wait until Clayton-Thomas was back to release the ob­ligatory double live album — this way, all the hits are re-generated the way they are supposed to: even a non-fan of the C-T style like me will gladly acknowledge that having ʽAnd When I Dieʼ or ʽLucretia MacEvilʼ sung by the completely colorless personality of Jerry Fisher would have de­prived the experience of the smallest modicum of sense it could ever contain.

Anyway, In Concert, a non-US LP release (only issued in the States as late as 1991, under the alternate title of Live And Improvised), was culled from at least four or five different gigs that were played in the US and Canada in late summer and early fall of 1975, and, technically, were intended to promote New City, even though only two songs off that album were included in the tracklist (no idea how many were actually performed); the band lineup is essentially the same as on the studio album, except that George Wadenius, the guitar player, was halfway out, and is on some tracks replaced here by Steve Kahn, and on others by Mike Stern, who would go on to play with the band on the next two studio albums.

There is really not much of any substance to be said about In Concert. Whatever their flaws, BS&T are never anything less than professional — money-grubbers they might be, but nobody can say they don't work hard for their money, and the record proves it. The rhythm section is tight, the improvised passages at least try to be inspired, and, most importantly, the setlist nicely fluctu­ates between predictable, but worthwhile, hits and unpredictable excursions into tasteful jazz-rock territory: they give out energetic renditions of Chick Corea's ʽSpainʼ and Cannonball Adderley's ʽUnit 7ʼ, the latter as a tribute to the recently deceased performer. This is not my kind of music at all, really, but as far as my ears suggest, the performances should be pleasing enough for the general jazz fan, unless he's racist or something. Better this, at least, than covering the latest Bee Gees hits or still trying to grovel at the feet of Earth, Wind & Fire.

Occasional turn-offs do occur, and, sad to say, they are mostly the fault of Clayton-Thomas, who sometimes lets his hair down too much — for instance, turns the finale of ʽLucretia MacEvilʼ into blabbery mush (how many "talk to me, Lucy!"'s does it take to make us get the point?), or has a little too much fun with the audience at the end of ʽHi-De-Hoʼ (okay, so its anthemic chorus may be the perfect trigger for happy audience participation, but that is no excuse for turning it into sheer silliness). Worst of all, however, is that we get to hear David's take on ʽI Love You More Than You'll Ever Knowʼ — with all the throbbing pain of the original replaced with a Vegas-ap­proved schmaltz delivery, oversung, overscreamed, and even the lead guitarist somehow manages to transform the original wail into a pseudo-Page blues-de-luxe solo without any soul.

But on the whole, the experience is adequate: ʽLifeʼ, ʽRide Captain Rideʼ, the bulk of ʽLucretiaʼ and ʽHi-De-Hoʼ, the ubiquitous ʽYou've Made Me...ʼ — I do not see how these could be suscep­tible to serious criticism. Besides, ʽSpinning Wheelʼ gets an improvised fanfare-ridden passage in the middle, and ʽAnd When I Dieʼ is split in half with a John Lee Hooker cover and a Dave Barge­ron-led trombone jam — so they are being at least mildly inventive. All in all, In Concert might even be a good alternative to getting all the studio albums: in between the hits, the oldies, the improvisations, and the tributes, it captures the spirit of post-Kooper BS&T much better than any individual studio record, possibly with the exception of the 1969 one, and, several nasty flaws notwithstanding, deserves a thumbs up.

Check "In Concert" (CD) on Amazon