CHICAGO V (1972)
1) A Hit By Varèse; 2) All Is
Well; 3) Now That You've Gone; 4) Dialogue, Pt. 1; 5) Dialogue, Pt. 2; 6) While
The City Sleeps; 7) Saturday In The Park; 8) State Of The Union; 9) Goodbye;
10) Alma Mater.
It feels weird to state that, after three
sprawling, excessive, bombastic, narcissistic double LPs in a row, Chicago's
first compact, restrained, «humble» single LP feels a little... disappointing.
In terms of style, Chicago V is not
at all a departure from the band's classic sound: still firmly in the
mildly-experimental jazz-rock ballpark, with tasteful touches of funk, soul,
and pop and no signs of cheap sentimentality. It was also an unexpected
commercial mega-hit, taking them to the top of the US charts for the first time
— see, all it took was to lower the cost from double to single vinyl to get
things going — and, heck, it may have been the only album ever with the name Varèse in one of the song titles to
achieve such popularity with the average buyer.
Yet, strange enough, I have always found it
fairly hard to get into it. On the surface, it's all good: there's brave sonic
experimentation (ʽA Hit By Varèseʼ could not have not contained any, right?), multi-part mini-suites merging jazz,
funk, and R&B like there was no tomorrow (ʽNow That You've Goneʼ), a couple
vehicles for Kath's guitar fireworks (ʽDialogueʼ), bombastic anthems (ʽState Of
The Unionʼ), and a catchy pop single (ʽSaturday In The Parkʼ). However, somehow
much, if not most of this, ends up sounding like rather limp background muzak
to my ears, with few moments forcing you to pay attention.
It is not quite clear what happened, but I
guess everybody is entitled to a bit of burnout after three double albums in a
row. Even the catchy pop single, first time ever
in Chicago history so far, does the unexplainable — straightforwardly rips off
Paul McCartney's ʽYou Won't See Meʼ for its base melody, though the overall
mood of the piece is inverted, so that instead of wistful melancholy we have
tepid, toothless, furry-cuddly excitement (it was reportedly inspired by a walk
Lamm took through Central Park — as somebody who really enjoys a good walk
through Central Park whenever I am in the neighborhood, I can certainly relate,
but there is no guarantee that the feeling will necessarily translate to
music). The song is not necessarily worse than any of Lamm's previous
optimistic, sunny pop singles, but the direct lifting of the chords is jarring:
truly, there is just no need to shove their «poor man's Beatles» side so
directly in our faces.
As for the bluesier / jazzier / funkier stuff,
it just sort of sits there. None of these tracks seem to have the same level of
creative ambition, nor the same amount of energy and passion as the earlier
records — compared to the I-II-III
punch, the band sounds tired (which they probably were) and out of ideas. Even
the ʽVarèseʼ thing, as nominally experimental and «anti-commercial» as it is,
seems more like a desperately self-conscious gesture — "okay, boys, this
doesn't really work out so well, let's pull ourselves together and concoct
something that Frank Zappa could be proud of and put it out front, so no piece
of shit critic can lay a finger on us!" It is not awful, it just lacks a
sense of purpose, because the album as a whole is not in the avantgarde plane
of things, and there does not seem to be much of a plan behind the music.
Things get a little better with ʽDialogueʼ, a
two-part suite with Kath's best lead guitar parts on the album and the whole
band whipping itself up into a socially conscious frenzy ("we can make it
happen, we can change the world now") — and even so, the experience seems
perfunctory, not even on the level of passion that you could see on ʽIt Better
End Soonʼ. At least Kath's work gives it an edge over the utterly dull six
minutes of ʽState Of The Unionʼ, a paralytic funky monster, with Cetera
stubbornly clinging to the same bass figure and the brass section huffing and
puffing at the brick house of boredom.
Perhaps most of the blame for this should be
laid upon Lamm, singlehandedly credited for eight out of ten tracks on the
album; but the problem is that everybody,
including simple players, seems tired and sparkless — even Pankow's ʽNow That
You've Goneʼ is a rather stereotypical piece of R&B, whose formulaically
desperate lyrics ("how can I go on in emptiness, feeling so alone every
day") would feel strangely at odds with the brash liveliness of the
arrangement, were not this liveliness itself so stiff and robotic. Finally,
Kath ends things with ʽAlma Materʼ, a bland, preachy piano ballad that is oh so
not saved by its ponderous lyrics
("we must not lose control / of the possibility of the discovery / that
would let everybody see / that we were just meant to be" — what is this,
Hegel for dummies?).
As subjective as this impression truly is — I
doubt that even a professional musicologist could have transparently described
the significant differences between I-II-III
and V, since they transcend basic
melody and harmony — it leaves me with no choice but to give the album a
decisive thumbs
down, and mark it as the beginning of the decline: most importantly,
it shows that Chicago eventually perished as a respectable act not because it
had betrayed its winning formula for sap and pap, but precisely because it
drifted towards sap and pap upon becoming incapable of maintaining that
formula. «Objectivists» who judge Chicago on a two-basket basis («jazz-rocky
Chicago = good, sentimental poppy Chicago = bad») will probably want to
disagree, but you'd really, really
have to love jazz-rocky Chicago in order to allow Chicago V all the time it takes to grow on you and lure you in with
alleged subtle nuances.
No comments:
Post a Comment