BEE GEES: LIVING EYES (1981)
1) Living Eyes; 2) He's A
Liar; 3) Paradise; 4) Don't Fall In Love With Me; 5) Soldiers; 6) I Still Love
You; 7) Wildflower; 8) Nothing Could Be Good; 9) Cryin' Every Day; 10) Be Who
You Are.
A classic case of post-(Saturday Night)fever
fatigue syndrome — the Bee Gees' first album of the new musical decade sounds forced,
tired, uninspired, and generally superfluous. The brothers had allegedly
disowned the album themselves, claiming that they were pressed into recording
by the studio at a time when they really needed to sit back and rethink their
image: with the anti-disco backlash tearing their reputation to pieces, and the
proverbial truth of «the higher the climb, the harder the fall» landing upon
them in full force, it was really
unclear where to go next after the spirits had flown and yesterday's
mass-cultural heroes became today's mass-cultural clowns.
The biggest irony of it all is that, in the
end, Living Eyes still ended up a
much better album than both the one that preceded it and the «comeback» that
would follow it six years later. Not having enough time to rethink anything and
come up with a carefully construed «nu-image», the Bee Gees simply resorted to
the one thing they usually did best — that is, writing pop songs and recording
them. Living Eyes has no direct «affiliation»:
it is not disco, it is not New Wave, it is not trendy synth-pop, it is not
retro symph-pop, it is just a bunch of typically Bee Gees songs, recorded without
much forethought or gimmickry. Not particularly good Bee Gees songs, I might add
— there is nothing here to suggest even a partial recovery from the
disco-induced «genius' block» — but not utterly without redeem, either.
The overall sound of the album is glossy and
synthetic alright (the Bee Gees would never again be able to recapture the
«organic» sound of their pre-Main Course
records), but the acoustic folk-pop harmonies that form the core of the Gibb style
are well emphasized, and the guitars are not drowned out by the electronics (as
they would be eventually), nor is the production crappy enough to infringe on
the vocal harmonies. Speaking of which, Living
Eyes almost completely rejects falsetto — ʽSoldiersʼ being the only serious
exception — welcoming Barry Gibb back to the «world of real men», provided he
still remembers what it used to look like.
So the major problem is not with the style — it is rather bland, sterile, and
unadventurous, but not ugly, crassy, or cheesy — but with the songs. Things
start out kind of okay with the title track, whose romantic chorus is
relatively pretty and even seems to recapture a tiny spark of the «courteous
nobility» of old. Slow it down a little bit, bring back Bill Shepherd, and it
would not feel out of place on To Whom
It May Concern at least. Rebirth? No, because already the second track,
ʽHe's A Liarʼ, inexplicably chosen as first single, is a pointless pop-rocker,
recorded in a style that could have worked for Foreigner, but not for the Bee
Gees — and its main hook is a contrast between a deep baritonal and a high
falsetto rendering of the song title: a silly gimmick that only confirms that
yes, the well has run dry after all.
Only three songs out of ten have managed to register
on my brain cells with a positive charge — these are the title track;
ʽParadiseʼ, another midtempo adult contemporary ballad with a very natural and
emotional flow from verse to bridge to chorus (my favourite part is the bridge
— the "run a mile for the minute" part); and, out of the blue, a
Maurice original — there is something odd about the wimpiness of ʽWildflowerʼ
that produces an endearing effect. Everything else either comes across as an inferior
copy of one of these three songs, or represents an inept attempt at «rocking
out softly» (ʽCryin' Every Dayʼ is in the same vein as ʽHe's A Liarʼ, and goes
in the same null void direction). Some diversity is provided by Robin taking
significantly more leads than he did last time around, but with such poor
songwriting, it does not matter much already who is singing what.
Maybe at least a part of the lackluster
atmosphere of the record could be explained by the Gibbs firing their studio
veterans at the beginning of the sessions — not only Blue Weaver, who was responsible
for the keyboards throughout the disco period, but even old buddy Alan Kendall,
who was already hanging around in their Trafalgar
days. With more than a dozen different session musicians taking their place,
there is no wonder that Living Eyes
has no «signature sound», or that the strictly-bread-and-butter arrangements do
not offer even a single curious flourish or twist to feed the hungry ear. On
the other hand — who knows if anything
could be done for the Bee Gees at the time? The harder they come...
No, the only words of consolation would have to
refer to the falsetto-dropping and the revival of the acoustic guitar — Living Eyes is boring alright, but it
sounds like a record made by living people;
people who, perhaps accidentally, did not have the time to program it into an
efficient commercial proposition and just went ahead on an almost spontaneous
basis. It is a dang shame they could not do better: this might have been their
very last chance at making a late-period mini-masterpiece, but, after all, they
did sign the contract, and the devil did honor his part of the deal — now it was up to him to ensure that the Bee
Gees would never properly rise again.
Still, it seems cruel to end the review with a
thumbs down, considering how, in retrospect, the record really looks like a
breath of moderately fresh air in between all the methane emissions. Ironically,
despite making history as the first album to have been printed in CD form (the
brothers even got an extra BBC promotion for that, although it didn't do them
any good anyway), Living Eyes has
long since been out of print, and the Gibbs, dead or alive, would not go out of
their way to help re-endorse it. But eventually, in a better, post-World War
III world, once Bee Gees albums are no longer rated by the amount of copies
sold, that mistake will be rectified.
Check "Living Eyes" (MP3) on Amazon
"their very last chance at making a late-period mini-masterpiece"
ReplyDelete...and they managed to make a maxi-masterpiece – or maxipiece.:)