Cher: Closer To The Truth

CHER: CLOSER TO THE TRUTH (2013)

1) Woman's World; 2) Take It Like A Man; 3) My Love; 4) Dressed To Kill; 5) Red; 6) Lovers Forever; 7) I Walk Alone; 8) Sirens; 9) Favorite Scars; 10) I Hope You Find It; 11) Lie To Me.

In 2002-2003, Cher conducted the highly successful Living Proof: The Farewell Tour, setting a record for the highest-grossing concert tour by a female performer ever — and even capped off with a live album, recorded in Las Vegas (where else?), but even in the face of the many embar­rassing and dishonorable things that Only Solitaire Reviews have stooped to over the past few years, setting up a special review for a live album by Cher would be too much (I might as well be reviewing a Crazy Frog live album, I guess).

Upon concluding the tour, Cher did indeed retire from live performance and making new studio records — and since, as we all know too well, pop stars never ever lie and treasure their artistic integrity far more than they value their personal fortunes, the fact that somebody went ahead and assumed the identity of «Cher» in 2013 with a brand new CD release should be regarded as an act of musical fraud and identity theft. Indeed, whoever it was — and with Autotune masking half of the vocals, who can really tell these days? — left us some hints: Closer To The Truth implies a lack of truth, and the album cover features a blonde-haired Cher look-alike with so much symbo­lical white around her that you'd think she's really died and gone to Heaven... hey, wait a minute. Is the real Cher really dead? Have the cockroaches had the upper hand? Is this Christina Aguilera masking as Cher (we know she can do a mean Cher impression)?..

Thank God, though, Only Solitaire is all about the music rather than the people behind it, and so we can legitimately separate the good old conspiracy theories from the plain fact of how crappy the music is, no matter who in particular is standing behind it. Actually, if you really love formu­laic techno-pop, it might not sound all that crappy — whether there is an actual human being called Cherilyn Sar­kisian here or not, the «Cher business machine» is still churning like crazy, and the numerous corporate writers and producers ensure a certain standard. The vocal hooks are there alright — just a few listens, and without a proper antidote you'll be jerking spasmodically and singing "This is a woman's world!" and "You gotta take it like a man!" and "Baby I am dres­sed to kill!" and "For now I've gotta walk alone!" like there was no tomorrow. And we gotta give this «past-farewell Cher» what's due — even without the special production effects, she can still belt these hooks out like she means it, in tune and with sufficient power.

Unfortunately, the «business machine» is not designed for any sorts of creativity, though: other than the vocal hooks, everything else is reduced to the most pedestrian types of techno beats and acid-drenched synth patterns. Well, almost everything: every once in a while, they pull some ridi­culous retro-trick, like countrifying ʽI Walk Aloneʼ with a banjo rhythm pattern — it is very quickly drowned out by the beats and electronics, but still battles on bravely until the end of the song, because this is, like, the only thread that still ties this innovative artist to her roots in the old folk tradition. She came from California with a banjo on her knee, after all.

Towards the middle of the album, the endless stream of techno dance numbers begins to alternate with slower balladry, even including one or two tracks with potential (I think that with a better arrangement, ʽSirensʼ could turn out to be a really pretty and uplifting statement — and there's actually a first-rate shoegaze-style guitar solo in the middle, too!), but never really detracting from the «core value» of the record, which is to send you mindlessly spinning through the cram­med confines of the local nightclub while at the same time empowering you (if you're a woman) or disempowering you (if you're somebody else).

Naturally, I give the album a thumbs down, although, strange enough, I feel no specific «hatred» for it or anything. Maybe there's some subconscious feel of respect, after all, lurking somewhere very, very deep — after all, it's not every day that you come face to face with a 67-year old reigning queen of mainstream techno, as ridiculous as that might look in theory, and witness her singing like a fresh 30-year old (yes, I understand that the mind-blowing prolonged notes of "surren­der to me now" on ʽLovers Foreverʼ are most likely artificially extended, but they still had to have their roots in a natural strong voice). Essentially, at this point, it no longer matters what she is singing — it is only a matter of setting a personal record. Will she still be able to do it when she is 70? 80? 90? Will the business machine still hold? You probably won't live to witness it yourself, but maybe your grandchildren will — on the other hand, what with all the recent successes in tissue regeneration and genetic engineering, you never can tell...

The Rolling Stones: Flowers

THE ROLLING STONES: FLOWERS (1967)

1) Ruby Tuesday; 2) Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?; 3) Let's Spend The Night To­gether; 4) Lady Jane; 5) Out Of Time; 6) My Girl; 7) Back Street Girl; 8) Please Go Home; 9) Mother's Little Helper; 10) Take It Or Leave It; 11) Ride On Baby; 12) Sittin' On A Fence.

More like Jailflowers, considering that a mere three days after the album's release, Mick and Keith were to serve the first (and, snicker snicker, the last) day of their prison terms — and while this is almost certainly just a coincidence, all five of them on that album cover do look like they are staring at us from solitary confinement, rather than from the vantage point of having actually mutated into humanoid flower buds. (The issue of Brian Jones being the only one totally deprived of foliage is also legendary — and quite deliberate, according to Bill Wyman's memoirs). The most important part, of course, is still the psychedelic design of the lower part of the cover, indi­cating the band's readiness (on paper) to play the «flower power» game of 1967; yet only a few actual songs (or, rather, parts of actual songs) on the album could be deemed psychedelic, as this is a clear case of «image-updating» running ahead of musical values.

In fact, although the album came out in June '67 (and so, technically, it was this record, rather than Satanic Majesties, that could be seen by the public as the band's «answer» to Sgt. Pepper), all of the songs here had been recorded over a year-long stretch from December '65 to December '66, and selected for yet another «odds-and-ends» package to saturate the American market. It had all the chances to become the embarrassing sequel to December's Children (and many fans still forcedly claim to be embarrassed by it) — if not for the fact that by 1966, the Stones had become such amazing songwriters that even their odds and ends were far superior to almost everything else. Besides, only a few of these tracks, like ʽMy Girlʼ and the last two originals, were de facto outtakes; for the most part, it was still a matter of providing Americans with tracks that UK audiences already had had time to enjoy.

So, what we have here is (a) a bunch of tracks that had been included on the UK editions of Aftermath and Between The Buttons, but left out on US editions (ʽMother's Little Helperʼ, ʽTake It Or Leave Itʼ, ʽBackstreet Girlʼ, ʽPlease Go Homeʼ, and a misguidedly abridged version of ʽOut Of Timeʼ); (b) one single A-side that never was part of any previous LP on either side of the Atlantic (ʽHave You Seen Your Mother...ʼ); (c) three songs recorded in 1965 and left in the American vaults (ʽMy Girlʼ, ʽRide On Babyʼ, ʽSittin' On A Fenceʼ); (d) least satisfactory of all, three tracks that already were there on US editions of Aftermath and Between The Buttons — ʽRuby Tuesdayʼ, ʽLet's Spend The Night Togetherʼ, and ʽLady Janeʼ. One wonders, of course, why the hell did they not prefer to put up some other A- and B-sides instead, such as ʽ19th Ner­vous Breakdownʼ and ʽWho's Driving Your Planeʼ... but it does seem as if there were certain «conceptual» considerations involved as well.

For one thing, ʽRuby Tuesdayʼ works really great as an album opener. It does not take much more than Mick's deep-lodged "she would never say where she came from..." to establish an atmos­phere of romantic mystery, and it does not take much more than the song's baroque-pop arrange­ment to make one go, "wow, they're really traveling full speed on that Art train now!" It sets the mood perfectly — to the point that, as far as I recollect, Flowers happened to be my first Rolling Stones LP back when I was only beginning to go through the Sixties-fandom stage, and it forever shaped my perception of the Rolling Stones as a subtle, sensitive, psychological art-pop band, a perception which, as it turned out, was also crucial in assessing all the subtle nuances of their «blunt» blues-rock and country-rock recordings.

For another thing, as much as I hate to say it, quality-consistency-wise, Flowers is pretty much the number one record of the band's entire «pop» period. Every single song here is at least very good, and the majority represent the absolute pinnacle of pop music in 1967. People frequently complain about the inclusion of ʽTake It Or Leave Itʼ, and it does seem a little stiff and mono­tonous (and the "oh la-la-la-ta" chorus does seem a bit silly), but I've always had a soft spot for its «winding stairway» of a vocal melody, somewhat reminiscent of what the Beatles did on ʽIf I Fellʼ, and its general tone of soft reproach rather than condescending condemnation — at the very least, it's a cleverly written tune. People also complain about the hyper-sweet cover of Smokey Robinson's ʽMy Girlʼ (not surprisingly, this is the oldest recording of 'em all), but the Stones invest a ton of effort into this one — it comes out more stiff and mechanically robotic than any of the classic R&B versions, but it's still robotic perfection, and a little bit of robotic perfection never hurt a perfectly written song. Besides, we sometimes need evidence of Mick Jagger and the boys being able to express the simple, quintessential joy of being in love, rather than always ex­pecting them to be dissatisfied with one thing or another.

But ʽMy Girlʼ aside, Flowers is still the Stones at their «misogynistic» peak — other than the "I'm-in-love with an exclamation point!" attitude of ʽMy Girlʼ and the "I'm-in-heat with ten ex­clamation points!" attitude of ʽLet's Spend The Night Togetherʼ, it's all about asking her to ʽRide On, Babyʼ, or at least to ʽPlease Go Homeʼ, because who would really like to keep a ʽBackstreet Girlʼ who's permanently ʽOut Of Timeʼ? And some of these are downright nasty — ʽBackstreet Girlʼ, in a way, might be the nastiest thing Jagger ever wrote, simply because you never know how much of this "don't want you out in my world, just you be my backstreet girl" is acting and how much is sincere attitude, considering the sheer number of "backstreet girls" the man did keep around the world even in his married life. The truly perverse thing about it is, of course, how tender and pretty the melody is — the acoustic folk melody almost makes you see visions of Joan Baez, with the accordeon adding a bit of a French feel (gotta love these stereotypes, the only thing missing is Mick imitating a French accent — ah, ces Gaulois, les rois d'adultère!), so that the whole thing really has the sound of a sentimental serenade.

Perhaps the acid, holier-than-thou-bitch attitude of the lyrics is constantly softened by the melo­dic side — thus, the flaming accusations of the protagonist's former partner in ʽRide On Babyʼ are tempered by Brian's harpsichord and marimbas, setting a playful, genteel mood; and ʽOut Of Timeʼ, with even more marimbas and a tango-ish three-note bassline that seems to stem out of the same ballpark as ʽMy Girlʼ, sounds more like a slow, sensual, sexy dance with a courteous part­ner than the proper soundtrack for a bitter rejection. In other words, the Stones here play a sort of «fifty ways to leave your lover» game with you, as long as each of the ways is paved with gallant musical mannerisms. Even ʽPlease Go Homeʼ, one of the heaviest tunes on here, with a Bo Did­dley beat at heart and the most crashing drum sound from Charlie ever, is turned psychedelic and has Brian playing with an oscillator (was there anything that escaped the guy's attention in 1966? it's amazing to think how quick his downfall was in 1967) — far removed from baroque-pop values, but still set upon tricking you into headbanging and blowing your mind and not noticing how cruel the words are. (Granted, it is the protagonist who is accusing the girl of cruelty, so we are really in the dark about who's truly hurting who).

Yet let us not make the mistake of being swept away by too much political correctness and keep on remembering that the greatness of Flowers lies in the melodic instincts of Jagger and Richards, in the sonic instincts of Brian Jones, and in the general atmosphere of the time, which somehow opened up the most inventive and experimental qualities even in the souls of such sidemen as Ian Stewart or Jack Nitzsche. No two songs on this album sound alike — hooks are being cast at you from everywhere in the form of feedback blasts, brass fanfares, harpsichord flourishes, marimba rolls, guitar riffs, and even folksy acoustic picking patterns such as Keith and Brian demonstrate on the nearly forgotten gem ʽSittin' On A Fenceʼ (a brilliant showcase for some weaving tech­niques that I don't think they ever repeated anywhere else). All of this makes Flowers the greatest Rolling Stones album that was never intended to be a Rolling Stones album in the first place — and, by the way, unlike Between The Buttons, it does not come across as so completely «Brit-centered», which is only too natural considering how it was made specially for the American market.

A rip-off it may be, but it still feels coherent and even conceptual enough to merit being retained as a permanent fixture in the band's active catalog... and so it is, apparently, even up to this day when it could have been safely dissolved and transformed into bonus tracks by ABKCO executives. (Not that they're driven by any noble artistic motives, mind you — one more Stones album to sell is one more source of income). Regardless, it should get every bit of support from us that the previous two albums get — thumbs up a-plenty.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre: Mini Album Thingy Wingy

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE: MINI ALBUM THINGY WINGY (2015)

1) Pish; 2) Prší Prší; 3) Get Some; 4) Dust; 5) Leave It Alone; 6) Mandrake Handshake; 7) Here Comes The Waiting For The Sun.

Yes, apparently this is the correct title of Newcombe's second artistic outburst of 2015 — not ʽPishʼ, as a fairly securely stoned Brian Jones seems to be telling you from his vantage position on the front sleeve. ʽPishʼ itself is only the name of the first track, which opens with a soaked-in-Sixties echoey blues-pop riff and quickly becomes a slow, monotonous, psychedelic vamp that takes you all the way back... no, not really into 1967, but rather into 1995-1996, back to New­combe's own roots. Pretty much all of the unpredictable, bizarrely mashed-up experimentation of the band's «second golden age» that began with My Bloody Underground has been thrown out of the window — so who knows what happened? My best guess is that Anton, once again, switched his drug of preference choice.

The results are not too bad, especially because of the wise choice to keep this restoration of tra­ditional Brian Jones family values short and sweet — 34 minutes is indeed a «mini-album», al­beit far from Newcombe's first attempt at brevity, and he does manage to drag us through some cool ideas and textures in the meantime. The problem is... all the old problems are back, too: each of the tracks exhausts its load of ideas in about one minute, and then it all depends on whether that one minute was enough to cast its trance over you or not. Take the longest piece for an example: ʽLeave It Aloneʼ quickly sets up a tough threatening mood, constructing a double-barrel musical machine out of one fuzzy, sustained chord and a dirty one-string vamp around it (think Jorma Kaukonen trying out Neil Young's style), and it's cool, but that's all it does for six minutes, and I cannot even say that the lead guitar kicks sufficient ass to endure this. (A real Neil Young pro­bably could, but a real Neil Young would probably refuse to play like he was stoned out of his mind, and with BJM this is almost always an obligatory condition).

On the slightly odder side of things, ʽPrší Pršíʼ does continue the recently established tradition of odd collaborations — this time, with Vladimir Nosal, allegedly the frontman of an indie band from Slovakia named Queer Jane (judging by what little I've heard from then on Youtube, they specialize in Beatlesque pop). Curiously, even though most of Queer Jane's material is sung in English, this track is sung in Slovak, because what can be more psychedelic than the usage of a Slavic language on an American retro-psychedelic album? However, if Slavic languages do not, by their very existence, already mystify and befuddle you, the track will hardly be more than just another pleasant, quickly forgettable psychedelic pastiche.

Elsewhere, you find a passable, but useless cover of a bona fide psychedelic classic (ʽDustʼ by the 13th Floor Elevators, with a lovingly recreated sound of that band's infamous electric jug); ano­ther slow, pleasant, predictable vamp that seems to be here just so that Anton can use a cool title like ʽMandrake Handshakeʼ; and, corniest of all, ʽHere Comes The Waiting For The Sunʼ, which, sounds absolutely nothing like either ʽHere Comes The Sunʼ or ʽWaiting For The Sunʼ, but rather, as some reviewers have already noted, like Donovan's ʽHurdy Gurdy Manʼ. Not that good old Donovan hasn't done his fair share of waiting for the sun back in the day, but enough with the pseudo-post-modern titles already, eh?

Anyway, no cri­ticism whatsoever about the sound of it all, Newcombe still understands the art of classic psyche­delic guitar (and throw in a bit of sitar and Mellotron where appropriate) better than anybody else in this world. It's just that he has once again given up on the idea to advance that art, and remains perfectly content just to fiddle around with it, in his usual «glorified lazy» mode. And putting your trusted mascot, for the first time ever, right up front on that album sleeve (did he even secure the rights for the photo?), is not going to mask the fact that Mini Album Thingy Wingy does seem like an attempt to wing it, and if so, then why does it even exist? We can al­ways pull off Their Satanic Majesties' Second Request off the shelf if we're in this kind of mood — there's no big need for a third one.

Anathema: A Fine Day To Exit

ANATHEMA: A FINE DAY TO EXIT (2001)

1) Pressure; 2) Release; 3) Looking Outside Inside; 4) Leave No Trace; 5) Underworld; 6) (Breaking Over The) Barriers; 7) Panic; 8) A Fine Day To Exit; 9) Temporary Peace.

Normally, an album titled A Fine Day To Exit would probably be expected from a band that de­cides to call it a day — but we are dealing with Anathema here, a band for whom calling it a day is pretty much a profession, except they're calling it a day for humanity as a whole, rather than just their own sorry asses. So no, they are not disbanding: this is merely the next installation in the ongoing series of «numb and number», and, unfortunately, not an improvement on the flaws of Judgement, but rather an exacerbation of said flows.

By this time, it seems like they might be taking their clues from Radiohead rather than Pink Floyd, with most of the songs showing a quiet, tired, enfeebled type of depression and disillusionment, as conveyed by weighted-down vocals, morose piano lines, and atmospheric use of electronics, although not enough of the latter to suggest interference with Kid A: rather, it is the alt-rock Bends version and the art-rock OK Computer version of Radiohead that serve as primary cue-setters. Slow, atmospheric, depressing songs, only occasionally livened up by faster tempos that still preserve the same atmosphere (ʽPanicʼ) and always suggesting being trapped without any hope of escape in the deep, dark well of one's own subconscious, except that, unlike Radiohead, lyrics-wise they are still unable to escape the «always talking with the ghost of my brutally muti­lated lover» cliché.

That cliché is, however, far from the worst problem of the album — the worst problem is that most of the songs are honestly no good. Like that Radiohead atmosphere or not, it was always supported by radical, challenging, or at least instantly memorable musical ideas. Here, though, as the Cavanagh brothers are assisted by drummer John Douglas in their songwriting duties, I fail to find anything that would sound genuinely unusual or memorable. The songs take too much time to do too few interesting things. The pianos and acoustic guitars sound nice, but do not take any serious chances outside of the predictably comfortable zones of adult-pop balladeering and dark (or not too dark) folk strumming. And the electric guitars, when they do come in, largely sound like any average alt-rock band would sound — basic grungy patterns that even Radiohead had largely left behind by 1995.

The very first song on the album, ʽPressureʼ, which was also released as a single, begins in full-out ʽKarma Policeʼ mode, jamming your ears in between big echoey drums and forcefully hit piano chords, but this all just seems like a moody setup for the vocal melody, and the vocal melody seems like just a setup for the chorus, with all the stakes placed on the culmination of "I don't care where you go, you won't get away from me", and, frankly, it's not much of a culmina­tion — the singer sounds so bored with himself, these words resonate like an empty threat. If there is any pressure, it's hardly above permissible levels. I can understand why the vocals never shoot past the murmur level, or why there is no shrill guitar solo to juice up the crescendo, but see, these are fairly ordinary musical moves that they use to create the atmosphere, and if you're ma­king an ordinary song, you are at least entitled to juice it up with ordinary, but efficient musical clichés. «Tastelessly exciting» takes preference over «tastefully boring», and it's not even all that tasteful to begin with (though it cannot be said that they are embarrassing themselves with this attitude, either, like they often did on the early albums).

And if that's ʽPressureʼ for us, then what about ʽReleaseʼ? Surely this title should be concealing some climactic denouement of its predecessor? Reveal a shattering musical explosion? It begins promising enough — a thin, sharp acoustic guitar tone, lightly attenuated with a simmering electronic pattern; eventually, more and more synth overdubs start piling up in anticipation of the climax... and that climax? A weak, monotonous texture of funky electric guitar overdubs merging in a generic alt-rock grind. Well... like "pressure", like "release".

The record continues in the same mediocre manner, alternating heavier and lighter moments in such a smooth and polite manner that you hardly ever notice the transitions, and offering us vocal parts that are so gentlemanly refined that I almost begin to wonder — couldn't it have been more effective for them to go back to growling vocals? Probably not, but this is just way too soporific for my aural nerves. And almost as if they wanted to really rub it in, the last track (ʽTemporary Peaceʼ) seems like a bad parody on a conceptual post-rock suite: a moody, hookless Gothic ballad part, followed by a couple minutes of seawaves crashing upon the shore (wait, did I say "cra­shing?"... nothing on this album is "crashing"... more like "swishing"...), followed by a couple more minutes of gravel-crushing footsteps on the shore and disjoint pieces of recorded conver­sation, followed by a few minutes of total silence, and then followed with a two-chord acoustic ditty with seemingly improvised «comical» lyrics ("Morten Harket's brand new go cart / Foul mouthed and smelling of onions"). Actually, the acoustic ditty might be the best part of the album because it is at least the only thing about it that is not so totally safe and predictable.

So, unfortunately, a thumbs down — even if this is not a stereotypically «bad» record, this is one of those cases where I'd rather sit through Aerosmith's Pump or Britney Spears' In The Zone, be­cause those records, bad as they are, at least give you food for thought and impressions to keep. A Fine Day To Exit, on the contrary, shows that the boys mean good (they are actually trying to find some serious justification for being so depressed), but they don't really have the means, such as brilliant songwriting and inventive arrangements, to do good.

Cheap Trick: Sgt. Pepper Live

CHEAP TRICK: SGT. PEPPER LIVE (2009)

1) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; 2) With A Little Help From My Friends; 3) Lucy In The Sky With Dia­monds; 4) Getting Better; 5) Fixing A Hole; 6) She's Leaving Home; 7) Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!; 8) Within You Without You; 9) When I'm Sixty-Four; 10) Lovely Rita; 11) Good Morning Good Morning; 12) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise); 13) A Day In The Life; 14) Medley: Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight / The End.

Okay, so this is the weirdest one yet. As if the innumerable quotations, periphrases, hints, and other types of Beatles influence (along with the occasional direct cover like ʽDay Tripperʼ) did not suffice; as if they needed something very direct, very blunt to confirm the title of «American Beatles»; as if work on The Latest stimulated their nostalgia glands to the point where itching gets dangerously close to bursting — Cheap Trick went ahead and did it, climbing up on stage and pulling a one-time Phish on us by covering Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in its entirety, in commemoration of the 42nd anniversary of its release, because who the heck cares about round dates? The urge is all that matters.

Actually, we learn from the liner notes that they were doing this as early as 2007 (when there was a round date after all), first with the LA Philharmonic Orchestra, then with other orchestras in different venues — the liner notes do not specify when and where this particular recording was made, but the orchestra is the New York Philharmonic — including a two-week run at the Las Vegas Hilton in September 2009: a royal venue for a royal album! Curiously, they did not follow it up with a medley of Elvis hits, as much as some of the regular patrons would love to hear that, I'm pretty sure.

The choice of Sgt. Pepper was probably quite deliberate — apart from continuing to exist as the quintessential Beatles / quintessential art-pop record in the communal mind, it was also the one album that most glaringly symbolized rock music's transition from stage-based to studio-based: all the innumerable studio tricks that gave Pepper its otherworldly, psychedelic sheen could not be replicated on stage, even if somebody had solved the screaming girl issue. At the same time, Sgt. Pepper was the first Beatles album that was put together as a continuous, quasi-conceptual suite of songs, with an intro and an outro, and thus, deserved to be performed as a single piece. And so here we are — who but Cheap Trick, these reputable «American Beatles» who'd worked so much out of the direct shadow of their UK predecessors, to try and realize that dream? Parti­cularly now that they have already realized theirs, and are left with nothing much to do?

And yet, there's a problem. If they are doing an «authentic» Beatles-like vision of Sgt. Pepper, then this record has to be considered a failure, because, honestly, it does not sound that much like the Beatles (see below on the major discrepancies). But if they are doing a «Cheap Trick inter­preta­tion of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper» — then, in my opinion, they are not offering enough Cheap Trickery to make it significantly different. In other words, the performance may have been fun to attend in person, but as an album release, it kind of slips through the cracks, and does not intrigue me all that much to warrant subsequent listens.

The songs are, indeed, played as close to the original as they can be — but within the context of a standard four-piece rock band, expanded with an additional keyboardist, a couple extra backing vocalists, and an orchestra. (I don't know who plays the Indian instruments, but maybe a few members of the orchestra were switching between Western and Eastern ones); there is no specific goal of perfectly recapturing the Sgt. Pepper ambience, so you don't get much by way of weird effects on the guitars, and there are no backing tapes whatsoever, either, so you don't get the kaleidoscopic dazzling patterns on the instrumental parts of ʽMr. Kiteʼ. In other words, the classic colorfulness of Sgt. Pepper is here, if not exactly turned to monochrome, then at least greatly re­duced, which only goes to confirm the legend of the album's irreproducibility (is that a word?) in a live setting (unless you do use backing tapes, but that's cheating).

Another problem, from that angle, is Zander's performance. He has to take on the roles of both John and Paul, and while he's largely doing alright as John (and even as George on ʽWithin You Without Youʼ), his impersonation of Paul fails quite miserably — he consistently oversings and adopts a more «rocking» tone than necessary, even for such songs as ʽWhen I'm Sixty-Fourʼ, and as a crooner, he is not particularly fit for ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ, either. I'm not saying that Paul himself always does a great job on these songs when he is performing them live, but come on now, you just can't have the exact same person be John and Paul at the same time. They should have really found a different vocalist for those songs.

Now if you look at it from a different angle — imagine that this is Cheap Trick's reinterpretation of Sgt. Pepper as would be more fit for, say, a late Seventies audience (the same one who was instead cruelly tortured by the Sgt. Pepper movie back in the day) — then the whole thing makes a little more sense, but only a little. Here the chief point of interest would be Nielsen and his guitar work, as he transforms the majority of Pepper's guitar (and not only guitar) styles into variants of his own screechy rock'n'roll idiom. You get that screechy rock'n'roll style in the coda to ʽLucy In The Sky With Diamondsʼ, you get it in the jumpy, echoey finale of ʽLovely Ritaʼ, you even get it on soft numbers like ʽWith A Little Help From My Friendsʼ, with plenty of distorted block chords, 100% Cheap Trick rather than Lennon/McCartney. Does it work? Well... maybe, but it's not as if we're adding to the depth of the original here — rather, we're subtracting from it by reducing too many different things to the same common invariant. As much as I like the basic power pop format, it is only when you begin honestly applying it to music like Sgt. Pepper that you truly begin to dis-appreciate its sonic limitations.

Still, I think we should be generous and rank the results as at least a tiny notch above the level of «ridiculous one-time curiosity». At the very least, Cheap Trick's long history of Beatle-influenced work guarantees that this is not just a posh cash-in, but a truly heartfelt tribute to their idols. To be fair, I think they could have done a much better job with an album like Revolver, which was much more oriented at heavy guitar rock than Sgt. Pepper and which, on the whole, was far more influential on Cheap Trick's entire career (beginning with ʽTaxman Mr. Thiefʼ) than Sgt. Pepper, but I guess «Revolver Live» would have sounded less appealing to people who only remember the Beatles by their #1 album as per the average mainstream rankings. (They do, however, offer us the final part of the Abbey Road medley as an encore — so why not throw in ʽTaxmanʼ and ʽShe Said She Saidʼ?). Anyway, they do have a very close affinity with the material, although, dear friends, there is no need to rub it in our noses so bluntly — for instance, by boasting that, this time around, they were privileged to work with Sgt. Pepper's recording engineer himself, Geoff Emerick, to ensure further «authenticity» of the experience. Really, guys. The only thing missing was to pull out those Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band uniforms out of the moth closet — for some reason, they didn't even bother to have their own copies made.

Candi Staton: Candi Staton

CANDI STATON: CANDI STATON (1972)

1) Do It In The Name Of Love; 2) Darling You're All That I Had; 3) Blackmail; 4) In The Ghetto; 5) Wanted: Lover; 6) The Best Thing You Ever Had; 7) Lovin' You Lovin' Me; 8) I'll Drop Everything And Come Running; 9) You Don't Love Me No More; 10) The Thanks I Get For Loving You.

Another solid-to-boot offering, a little longer this time and without any cheap tricks like re-run­ning two songs from the previous album (now they re-run only one, ʽYou Don't Love Me No Moreʼ, but at least they had the good sense to remix it) — which isn't to say that there's a lot of interesting ob­servations one could make about the record. Everything here is about as plain and straightforward as its title and its cover photo. Her name is indeed Candi Staton (at least, I trust that information), and this is her, with a serious look in her eyes and a lot of Afro-American hair on that photo (I trust that information, too). And then we have ten more examples of early Seventies' deep Southern soul, bearing the usual Muscle Shoals seal of quality. What else is there to say?

Well, there's a really good version of ʽIn The Ghettoʼ, perhaps the definitive cover version as performed by a black artist (no offense to Elvis, but the image of him performing the song in posh Las Vegas venues has seriously undermined my capacity of enjoying his version). With minimal string participation and mournful rather than angelic backing harmonies, it manages to inject a bit of grittiness into the tenderness, and there's a special poignancy in Candi's singing of the line "and his mama cries". There's even a rumor that Elvis himself sent her a congratulatory telegram, but the song is highly recommendable to all regardless of whether this is true or not.

Other than that, the album shares the same issue with its predecessor — it continues the plan to soften up and commercialize Candi's sound, concentrating more on sensual balladry than on her kick-ass, stand-for-your-rights side: the latter is only represented by ʽBlackmailʼ, which is more sorrowful and melancholic than fiery, and a couple songs about cheating and lying on the second side. The best of these is probably ʽThe Best Thing You Ever Hadʼ (no pun intended), just be­cause it is funkier and heavier than most of its surroundings, but not in any sort of unique man­ner or anything. The other grooves are all just about equally pleasant and equally interchangeable. Every once in a while a hook stands out sharper than the rest — for instance, the massive push on the chorus line of ʽDo It In The Name Of Loveʼ — but it would still be a matter of nuance.

Curious bit of trivia: the only two songs for which Candi herself shares songwriter's credits are two of the bitterest ones — ʽYou Don't Love Me No Moreʼ and ʽThe Thanks I Get For Loving Youʼ. You could probably suggest they reflect her own personal experience with Clarence Carter, but the irony is that ʽYou Don't Love Me No Moreʼ features Clarence himself as co-writer, so there's some kind of Fleetwood Mac-style shit for you there. (Then again, scratch that, because that's the one taken from the first album, so it must have been written even before Candi and Clarence became properly romantically engaged). Nevertheless, it is impossible to tell which songs are more credible and convincing — the ones where she swears that "I'll drop every­thing and come running" or the ones where she gets no thanks for that — and this kind of con­summate artistry makes the whole thing both befuddling and intriguing at the same time. If only the songs had a few more twists and turns to them — but even as they are, what's wrong with a little bit of raw love-and-hate material, set to generic, but well-performed R&B melodies? Count this as a no-thumbs-up recommendation.

Captain Beefheart: Trout Mask Replica

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART: TROUT MASK REPLICA (1969)

1) Frownland; 2) The Dust Blows Forward 'N The Dust Blows Back; 3) Dachau Blues; 4) Ella Guru; 5) Hair Pie: Bake 1; 6) Moonlight On Vermont; 7) Pachuco Cadaver; 8) Bills Corpse; 9) Sweet Sweet Bulbs; 10) Neon Meate Dream Of A Octafish; 11) China Pig; 12) My Human Gets Me Blues; 13) Dali's Car; 14) Hair Pie: Bake 2; 15) Pena; 16) Well; 17) When Big Joan Sets Up; 18) Fallin' Ditch; 19) Sugar 'N Spikes; 20) Ant Man Bee; 21) Orange Claw Hammer; 22) Wild Life; 23) She's Too Much For My Mirror; 24) Hobo Chang Ba; 25) The Blimp (Mousetrap­replica); 26) Steal Softly Thru Snow; 27) Old Fart At Play; 28) Veteran's Day Poppy.

Trout. Was there ever anybody out there before who'd thought of using the word «trout» for the title of an LP or any significantly large musical composition (bar Schubert, perhaps, and even then he was not the inventor of the title)? The word has an odd flavor all by itself, and if you have a personage named Captain Beefheart who has an album with the word «trout» in it, that's odd­ness squared. But wait, we're not over yet — apparently, there's a «trout mask». So the guy's name is Beefheart, and he is impersonating a trout. Or is it a trout that is impersonating a guy called Beefheart? And who'd wear a trout mask, anyway, and for what symbolic purposes? And now comes the deadliest part — it's not even an actual mask, it's a replica of a mask. A fake image of a fake disguise of a guy called Captain Beefheart as a trout. That's at least three different layers of self-containing, straightforward, unfunny and un-ironic nonsense staring us right in the face, and we haven't even begun listening to the music yet.

The story of Trout Mask Replica has long since passed into legend and is easily discoverable in zillions of books and Web resources, although, as time goes by, it becomes harder and harder to verify which parts of it are documentally true and which ones are not — for instance, I have always been fascinated by stories of how Beefheart allegedly acted as a tyrannical guru for the members of his band, bordering on hypnotism as he «subdued them to his will», locking them up in his house until they'd learned to reproduce his crazy musical ideas on their instruments. Appa­rently, though, they were convinced that he was a musical genius, and were willing to endure this physical and emotional torture just to add their names to the roster of heroes who would change the musical world forever — without much hope of any financial gain in the process. But, again, just how many of the particular anecdotes about The Magic Band in mid-'69 are documentally true and how many are due to the legend feeding off itself, remains unclear.

What is perfectly clear is that, whatever charm and fascination the music of Trout Mask Replica may have in store for humanity, nobody ever has managed to be perfectly clear about explaining it. If you are a neophyte, have just taken your first swipe at this thing, and are running around the Internet, trying to find explanations, suggestions, and medical support, you are most likely to end up frustrated, because the typical amateur review of TMR goes like this: «Oh, I really hated this at first. It made me sick and disgusted. But then I wanted to experience the sickness and disgust some more, and I listened to it again, and again and again... and upon the n-th listen, it really clicked. Now I think it's just great. Such a great album. So weird, so unlike everything else, so great. Great, great, great. It has completely changed my life. Beefheart forever! Such a great masterpiece. I even threw all my other records away, because I can't listen to them anymore without getting bored. Give it a try... heck, give it five, six, sixty tries, eventually you'll realize it's the greatest of the greatest just like I did. Fast and bulbous — that's the key!»

So, for a change, it might interest you to read a few words from a guy who actually gave TMR quite a bit of a fair chance — been revisiting it occasionally, once a year or so, over the past 15 years of my life — and whose life, believe it or not, still remains to be changed by the experience. In my original review, I gave it an 11/15 rating, which, I now realize, was sort of an insult: TMR just cannot be considered a «middle ground» rating. You either love this record or you hate it; you either respect it with admiration or despise it with the utmost contempt. My attitude is one of admirable respect — yet at the same time I still «hate» it in that I have never, ever experienced the slightest emotional attachment to it, and blame that quite explicitly on the boldness of the Captain's musical decisions.

Indeed, TMR marks the peak of Beefheart's adventurousness. A very telling fact is that, although the record is a double LP, the length is achieved not through long-winded jamming improvisa­tions (which would be the obvious thing to expect from 1969), but through an overabundant ex­cess of individual musical ideas — the longest track on the album barely runs over five minutes, and, on the average, few tracks cross the 2:00 – 2:30 mark. The man's creative juices were over­flowing, as he wrote a ton of new poems / lyrics and set each one to a distinct «melody» that seemed to challenge every conventional standard ever made. Of course, he didn't go as far as in­vent all the new rules completely from scratch, but he did «deconstruct» and completely subvert the harmonic structure of pop, folk, blues, and even jazz idioms in ways that made even Zappa sound like a teen pop idol in comparison. It is not for nothing, of course, that the man put ʽFrown­landʼ as the first track: "My smile is stuck / I cannot go back t' yer Frownland... / I want my own land / Take my hand 'n come with me / It's not too late for you / It is not too late for me". Well, it might be too late for me, after all, but that does not mean I have to so thoroughly refuse to take the brave Captain's hand for a brief while, anyway.

If there is one thing that could be considered disappointing, it is how predictable the record eventually turns out to be in its unpredictability. As ʽFrownlandʼ begins, we witness the major secret of TMR unveiled: each of the players is playing a slightly — or seriously — different melody that is slightly — or seriously — out of key with every other one. The trick is in not making the final result sound like a complete cacophony, and indeed, the tracks have some sort of weird logic of their own: always on the brink of falling apart, yet in reality held together quite tightly by hours and hours and hours of thorough rehearsals (as most of you probably already know, nothing here is said to be improvised — all of these parts were diligently learnt by the musicians in advance). Enjoying this music, though, is a feat for true weirdos of the Beefheart order, because, let's face it, as decent as those musicians were, they had too much trouble lear­ning to play the odd parts and keep in relative sync with each other to actually invest much feeling into these parts. Every time I listen to any of these songs, I can almost feel the tremendous strain on everybody's brains, ears, eyes, and hands — I can't say that those guys were having as much fun recording this stuff as, say, some of the better improvisational free-form jazz artists, or even King Crimson, for that matter. They get the machine going, and it goes on without stalling or falling apart — that's more or less enough for them.

Something like the instrumental ʽHair Pieʼ (both of its «bakes»), as complex as it is, essentially follows the formula of «take a straightforward blues jam, and make it slanted on all sides». The results are easy to admire — it takes a lot of work to play everything slightly out of tune, slightly discordant, slightly un-harmonic, and keep that steady wobble up for several minutes — but dif­ficult to interpret in an emotional / spiritual dimension. So yes, they do everything a little bit wrong, and they do it on purpose, and they practice for this, and it takes time and effort, and... what for? Merely to show us how it can be done, to shatter the walls of the conventional? But if anything, this shattering proves that the «conventional walls» weren't established by some evil tyrant to bind and rob us of our creativity — they were established based on certain natural laws, just like our human bodies. (This reasoning has made me, more than once, dream of an experi­ment in which a newly born child, for the first several years of his/her life, would be continuous­ly exposed to nothing but Trout Mask Replica — although I sure hope no parent would ever be that cruel in real life. But if you do happen to have a toddler, you can probably at least check out the toddler's reaction to ʽDachau Bluesʼ. Would the toddler be willing to prance around to the happy sounds of that, or any of the other, tracks on here?).

On the other hand, if we do accept this for an answer — yes, they are just doing that to shatter the formalities and the foundations — it is at least a legit excuse for the existence of TMR. For one thing, it is impossible to deny the influence of this platter. Numerous avantgarde and semi-avant­garde bands took the album as their banner in order to produce music that was, perhaps, some­what less arrogant and more conventional, but could actually be enjoyed on a subconscious level, and, most importantly, it showed the world that you could stay in a «pop» format and be vastly experimental without having to embrace the droning, Eastern-influenced psychedelic trappings of contemporary bands. Instead of going around looking for different sets of rules, you could stay with the ones you already had, but just tweak them around a bit — and see what happens. The only catch was that, in order for it all to look legit, you'd have to have a madman in charge: Van Vliet fully qualified, but many of his successors in the field were not.

And speaking of madmen, it's a whole different thing when the Captain actually establishes his presence on these songs. ʽHair Pieʼ-like instrumentals are one thing, but otherwise, you can just treat the backing tracks as a sort of white noise accompaniment for a beat poetry recital (not too far from the truth, considering that Beefheart actually heard very little of the music while over­dubbing his vocals). Sometimes, the poetry is sheer surrealist nonsense, but otherwise, it makes plenty of sense, beginning with the individualistic manifesto of ʽFrownlandʼ and all the way to the metaphoric loneliness of the ending ʽVeteran Day's Poppyʼ. ʽDachau Bluesʼ is an almost too straightforward tirade against World War III (although anti-Zionists might have a field day with the song, too, if they offer a personal interpretation of the line "those poor Jews... still cryin' 'bout the burnin' back in world war two..."); ʽMy Human Gets Me Bluesʼ is the madman's equivalent of a heartfelt serenade to a loved one ("You look dandy in the sky but you don't scare me / Cause I got you here in my eye"); ʽElla Guruʼ is the madman's take on the «put down a female socialite» garage genre; and all over, all over the place you get clear signs of a deeply felt frustration and desperation at the sorry state of humanity, perhaps best summarized in one line from ʽSteal Softly Thru Snowʼ — "man's lived a million years 'n still he kills".

As a result, one thing I can feel on the record — against all of its quasi-musical noise, rather than aided by it — is the big, beefy heart of the brave Cap'n. Even if he is being hysterical all the time, and making very little use of God's greatest physical gift to him (that four-and-a-half-octave range), I have no reason to doubt the sincerity and honest motivation of that hysteria; if there is one thing TMR does exactly right, it is presenting Don Van Vliet as a sensitive, humanistic human being whose surrealistic manners are not just masking his lack of substance — in that respect, it is a very clear advance on the two previous albums, where music took clear precedence over the lyrical and personal content (and, at least in the case of Strictly Personal, a very poor precedence it was). Even something like "I don't wanna kill my china pig", despite being rather, um, allegorical, still sounds like a fairly benevolent statement.

Perhaps the biggest support in favor of the argument that I am putting here comes from Beef­heart's subsequent career itself. With the possible exception of Lick My Decals Off, not a single one of his future albums would even dare come close to the craziness of the musical structures of TMR — the lyrics of his subsequent albums, though, as well as the vocal moods into which he prodded himself during the sessions, would often remain similar. Which, in a sense, makes TMR an intellectually fascinating musical dead end: a collection of «anti-tune-like tunes» for those who'd like to experience, if only for a brief while, what it is like to step out of the spaceship without a spacesuit on. To that end, it remains a unique curiosity; but I still hesitate to call it «great», if only because using such a lazy, trivial term for such an arduous, non-trivial record would be an insult by itself. I do suppose that everybody — yes, even including Britney Spears fans — could find it useful to sit through this record at least once. But anybody who honestly finds him­self addicted to this record (and I do mean honestly, rather than merely doing the cool thing to do) is probably in serious need of psychiatric help. And no, that's not a condescending remark or anything — after all, wasn't the record itself created by one of the biggest madmen in the business? Fast and bulbous, man. Fast and bulbous. Thumbs... oh wait, I do believe that my thumbs are stuck, I cannot go back t' yer Thumbland.

Cher: Living Proof

CHER: LIVING PROOF (2002)

1) The Music's No Good Without You; 2) Alive Again; 3) (This Is) A Song For The Lonely; 4) A Different Kind Of Love Song; 5) Rain, Rain; 6) Love So High; 7) Body To Body, Heart To Heart; 8) Love Is A Lonely Place Without You; 9) Real Love; 10) Love One Another; 11) You Take It All; 12) When The Money's Gone.

I shall hitherto abstain from resorting to crudely offensive jokes based on unscientific correlation of the title of this album with the photograph of the artist on the front cover. We take civility very seriously here at Only Solitaire — it is impolite and tasteless to produce jokes on subjects that have already served as the basis for entire joke pools and countless running gags — and prefer to treat the issues of Cher discontinuing a certified existence as a real human being and of Cher's music discontinuing the right to be called «music» as two completely separate issues, unrelated until proven so by a joint commission of expert plastic surgeons, fashion designers, musicologists, sound engineers, and cocktail waitresses.

In the meantime, we are going to keep this brief and state that since Living Proof, a bona fide follow-up to Believe, is everything that Believe wanted to be and less, the only people who would be interested in this second libation to the Great Goddess of Techno-Pop are those who actually dug the hypnotic grooves and mesmerizing textures of the lady's 1998 spiritual masterpiece. For the rest of us, the inclusion of ʽSong For The Lonelyʼ, the agonizing terror song of 2002 that may have cost more people their psychic sanity than 9/11 cost people their lives, will be sufficient reason to stay away from this abomination. Of all the songs written and recorded in memory of the tragic event, ʽSong For The Lonelyʼ, with its awful lyrics and generic techno beat, may indeed have been the most gruesome. The only way "I'll be by your side" is through radio overkill, and, indeed, the song was all over the place in 2002, almost like ʽBelieveʼ before it, and boy, have I ever suffered in public places (yes, even in Mother Russia) — you had to run for shelter from its shrillness, loudness, and total cheapness.

Unfortunately, the rest of the album is hardly better. There's nothing here, really, but a steadily calculated attempt at repeating the success of Believe — one flat, forgettable, trivial techno-pop piece of garbage after another. The European hit ʽThe Music's No Good Without Youʼ, with its light acid overtones and computerized chorus (which sounds as if they were teaching a robot some pickup lines), is, at the very best, just danceable (like everything else on here), but has less emotion than a Pepsi jingle. The near-obligatory Diane Warren contribution is the faux-Spanish «flamenco ballad» ʽBody To Body, Heart To Heartʼ that continues the «Latin exploitation» theme begun by ʽDove L'Amoreʼ and does it in an equally embarrassing manner. And if you try to dig a little deeper, in faint hopes of discovering some minor accidental nugget, beware — it is far more probable to hit a hot stream of shit under heavy pressure, such as ʽLove One Anotherʼ, a techno anthem taken from Dutch singer Amber whose chief achievement is setting the mantra "love one another, sisters and brothers" to a techno beat.

Ugh, no. It was pretty hard for me to imagine a sequel to Believe that would be even worse, but yes, this here is a sequel to Believe that is much, much worse — and did I even mention the Autotune abuse that is now all over the place? No? Go ahead, listen to ʽReal Loveʼ: it's like she's making fun of Stephen Hawking or something. Thumbs down does not even begin to describe the true reaction to the album — «six feet under» would be much closer to the truth.

The Rolling Stones: Between The Buttons

THE ROLLING STONES: BETWEEN THE BUTTONS (1967)

1) Let's Spend The Night Together; 2) Yesterday's Papers; 3) Ruby Tuesday; 4) Connection; 5) She Smiled Sweetly; 6) Cool, Calm & Collected; 7) All Sold Out; 8) My Obsession; 9) Who's Been Sleeping; 10) Complicated; 11) Miss Amanda Jones; 12) Something Happened To Me Yesterday.

The Rolling Stones' follow-up to their first fully autonomous album was recorded at around the same time as the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper and the Kinks' Something Else — and, unsurprisingly for the times but curiously from a retrospective point of view, sort of sounds like an uneasy, but fascinating cross between the two. Neither Mick nor Keith had a lot of kind words to say about it afterwards: Mick, in particular, complained about the production, dismissing it as overwrought, eccentric, and too much corrupted by the psychedelic atmosphere of the times (a complaint that would be thrice as relevant for their next album). Not counting the hit single that was plopped onto the American release of the album, they almost never performed any of these songs live after their touring schedule was cut short because of the 1967 busts — even in later years, when the Stones actively resuscitated a huge part of their old legacy, I think that ʽConnectionʼ (a vocal showcase for Keith) was the only number from B&B that they agreed to bring out on stage. And, naturally, this also agrees with the «conventional» critical view that the Golden Age of the Stones does not properly begin until they purged their respiratory system clean of Brian Jones and completely settled into the image of «midnight ramblers with sympathy for the devil».

Despite all this, ever since «art pop» became one of the key preferences of serious music fans around the world (about twenty years ago or so), Between The Buttons has managed to surrep­titiously strengthen its positions — and today it has pretty much become the banner around which are gathered all those who say «The Rolling Stones are — or, at least, were — really so much more than generic, ballsy blues-rock!» In fact, quite a few of these people seem ready to rate the band's pop phase around this time as completely equal to The Beatles and The Kinks, albeit, of course, strongly infected with the Stones' usual nastiness and sneeriness, which gives it a hooli­ganish charm all its own. Who knows, perhaps one day Mr. Jagger will cave in to the admiring reactions of these people — somehow it seems to me that his bad associations have more to do with the overall tense atmosphere of that transitional period, when the deteriorating mental condi­tion of Brian Jones, the erratic behavior of Andrew Oldham, and the upcoming drug busts would turn the «Summer of Love» into, arguably, the most miserable period in the personal and public lives of The Rolling Stones.

It can hardly be denied, of course, that Between The Buttons feels somewhat specialized. Jag­ger's lyrics here teem with bits and pieces of contemporary British reality, also both public and personal (at least two, if not more, of the songs seem to have been written directly about Mari­anne Faithfull), and the band's musical influences include music hall and vaudeville — later on, they may have regretted becoming so hypnotized with the UK pop fashions of 1966, but the thing is, they were a bunch of British kids, and they had what it takes, in their blood, to subvert these influences and use them correctly. (In fact, it makes far less sense to deride the Stones for going all «dandy» on our asses than to criticize them for the faux-country flavor of something like ʽDead Flowersʼ — not that I have anything against the latter, because the Stones were using the country idiom for their Stonesy purposes, rather than trying to become «legit» speakers of the country idiom; but then again, they did precisely the same with the Brit-pop idiom).

Before proceeding on to the songs, the usual UK/US debacle has to be taken care of: the US edi­tion, as previously mentioned, took two songs off the record (ʽPlease Go Homeʼ and ʽBackstreet Girlʼ, perhaps picked out for their particularly vicious brand of «misogyny») and replaced them with the contemporary hit single ʽLet's Spend The Night Together / Ruby Tuesdayʼ. Unlike the changes on Aftermath, which caused the US edition to lose some of its British flavor, this parti­cular decision does not affect the results too seriously: the baroque melancholy of ʽRuby Tues­dayʼ is an acceptable substitute for the softly mean serenading of ʽBackstreet Girlʼ, and ʽLet's Spend The Night Togetherʼ is clearly superior to ʽPlease Go Homeʼ, although its braggardly, entertainment-oriented facade does seem to be somewhat out of context here. At the very least, they could have preserved ʽYesterday's Papersʼ as the original opener — its spirit is much closer to the overall spirit of the album.

Anyway, since the same two songs would later be reproduced once again on Flowers, we'll talk about them later — here, let's try to concentrate exclusively on what makes Between The But­tons so, well, exclusive. ʽYesterday's Papersʼ does set the tone, combining brutality (in the guise of Keith's distorted guitar and Bill's heavy bass line) with gentleness (represented by Brian's vibraphone and Jack Nitzsche's harpsichord), but what really makes the song special is Jagger's vocal delivery. The song is usually supposed to be about his breakup with Chrissie Shrimpton, the recent heroine of ʽStupid Girlʼ and ʽUnder My Thumbʼ — but if on those two songs the singer intentionally sounded as mean and obnoxious as possible, ʽYesterday's Papersʼ sounds sad in comparison: despite the usual nasty words ("who wants yesterday's papers, who wants yesterday's girl?"), there's clearly a lot of pain in the singer's voice, and it's almost as if he is trying to coax himself into believing these words. It's ironic, isn't it? On one hand, we do know that "Seems very hard to have just one girl / When there's a million in the world" is pretty much the definitive slogan of Jagger's entire life, yet, on the other hand, these lines here are delivered without even the tiniest smudgeon of lasciviousness — on the contrary, there's an echo of desperation, ampli­fied by the «alarmed» falsetto backing vocals. Somehow, insecurity and even fear have entered the picture — a stark contrast with the cocky, self-assured spirit of Aftermath.

What this means is one more step down the ladder of psychological depth, and indeed, the multiple pictures of women that the band paints on this LP, both musically and lyrically, repre­sent genuine artistic progress compared to the somewhat flatter imagery of Aftermath. Not sur­prisingly, though — if Aftermath was Jagger's Chrissie Shrimpton album, then Between The Buttons is his Marianne Faithfull album, and Marianne, in his own words, is "very complicated", because even if it is true that "she knows just how to please her man, softer than a baby lamb", she's also quite "educated, doesn't give a damn", and, for the first time ever, the hero is even ready to admit his own inferiority: "she's sophisticated, my head's fit to bust". ʽComplicatedʼ is one of the many underrated gems on this record — combining a ʽSusie-Qʼ-style jungle beat with  music-hall poppy sentimentality, it totally succeeds in presenting its protagonist as deeply confu­sed, a scratch-your-head-in-bewilderment portrait of a relatively simple guy who is not quite sure of what to do with this unexpectedly over-intellectualized piece of ass that fell into his hands straight out of the sky. It's neither a loving serenade, nor a misogynistic condemnation, but a song of genuine bewilderment (and, perhaps, one of Mick's most honest ever songs about women).

Elsewhere, there is at least one loving serenade — ʽShe Smiled Sweetlyʼ is the band's most beautiful and original love confession up to that point. A song where the chief driving instrument is the Hammond organ (again, played by Jack Nitzsche, I guess), giving it a bit of a solemn church feel, and the chief secondary instrument is Charlie's drumset (he is pretty much dueting here with Jagger, setting up the stage for every important vocal move of his), and the heroine is addressed as the only person who can soothe and calm down those insecurities and fears that keep haunting the male hero. It is the Rolling Stones' equivalent — in their own way, of course — of ʽHere, There And Everywhereʼ, only in reverse: where McCartney projects his own sweetness, like an enveloping cloud, onto his imaginary lover friend, Jagger feeds on the sweetness of the imaginary lover friend to save him from his bad dreams. Which either makes McCartney a self-sacrificing brave knight and Jagger an egotistical bastard — or makes McCartney a narcissistic, condescending fop and Jagger an honest-to-God, grateful lover. You decide.

Of course, a Brit-pop era gallery of female portraits as painted by the Rolling Stones cannot be completed without a couple caricatures — ʽCool, Calm & Collectedʼ begins the job on the album's first side, and ʽMiss Amanda Jonesʼ completes it on the second one. The former is the Stones at their most music-hall-ish ever, clearly competing with Ray Davies in his ʽDedicated Follower Of Fashionʼ and ʽDandyʼ mode, except they prefer to sing about ladies rather than gentlemen, and they like to set those good old values on their head, taking the genre to absurd heights by frantically speeding up the tempo towards the end until everything collapses in a de­cidedly un-cool, calm, and collected manner. There's a symbolic dimension to it, too — the song can be interpreted as representing the mad socialite whirlwind in which the heroine is trapped, whirling ever faster and faster until... well, you know. But what sort of symbolism would be at­tached to the bizarre chords that Brian plays on that dulcimer, introducing each new verse with a few bars of some drunken, off-the-wall neo-Celtic dance pattern? I have absolutely no idea, but it's so totally cool that it's there anyway. There's elements of whirlwinding on ʽMiss Amanda Jonesʼ, too — I love how the guitars catch on to Jagger's "down and down she goes", "on and on she goes", "up and up she goes", and how the song, in its brief three minutes, becomes even more of a fussy madhouse than ʽCool, Calm & Collectedʼ.

Every other song on the album is good in its own way — I'm not going to fawn over the indivi­dual merits of every single bar of music here, but the vocal and instrumental hooks, the dense arrangements, the mood shifts, the psychologism are a permanent fixture. By the time we get around to the carnivalesque conclusion of ʽSomething Happened To Me Yesterdayʼ, the song is fully prepared for at least two interpretations — literally, this is the equivalent of the protagonist waking up after an acid trip, but figuratively, it is also an awakening from the psychotic confu­sion of the rest of the album — with its relatively sparse arrangement, enlivened by a loud, but very «earthy» support from the brass section, it really feels like "what the hell was that? Okay, time to pick yourself up and go home"; and, by the way, it initiates a whole string of similar dust-yourself-off finales for Stones' LPs where you could be shook up, stressed out, rocked and rolled, wined and dined, kicked around and tossed about all the way, but the last number (ʽSalt Of The Earthʼ, ʽYou Can't Always Get What You Wantʼ, ʽMoonlight Mileʼ, etc.) would always leave you off with, if not a glimpse of optimism, then at least a drop of sanity. This is neither good nor bad, it's just a manner of work for the Stones. Say what you will about the bad boys image — in rea­lity, ever since 1967, they have subconsciously regarded themselves as obligatory guardians of your sanity, morality, and general well-being. I mean, I don't know about yourself, but my own gut reaction to ʽSomething Happened...ʼ had always been «Gee, these guys really know how to make themselves my friends» before I actually took the time to study the lyrics and understand that they were inciting me to drop acid. And it's not as if my English was particularly bad or any­thing at the time. It was just a friendly gut reaction.

I'd be almost prepared to state that the album is better than Aftermath (and I might have some objective backing here: at the very least, the stylistic diversity and the musical complexity are at unquestionably higher levels), but perhaps it is the invisible hand of Mick Jagger that stops me at the last moment, indicating that, after all, Aftermath is a clearer and more genuine representation of the band's state of mind at the moment. On the other hand, this is essentially a futile point: both records are great in somewhat different ways, and the only reason to incite such a dispute would be to complete the restoration of Between The Buttons to the position of a classic record in its own rights — let us, once and for all, demolish the retrograde tradition that says «The Rolling Stones weren't really too Rolling Stonesy in 1967, so those albums have their moments, but leave Brit-pop to The Kinks, and psychedelia to The Beatles», and let this not-so-complicated thumbs up rating be a small contribution to that.

Bon Iver: 22, A Million

BON IVER: 22, A MILLION (2016)

1) 22 (OVER S∞∞N) 2:48; 2) 10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄; 3) 715 - CRΣΣKS; 4) 33 “GOD” 3:33; 5) #Strafford APTS; 6) 666 ʇ; 7) M♢♢N WATER; 8) 8 (circle); 9) ____45_____; 10) 00000 Million.

Okay, I think I get it now. It's some of that damn Illuminati business, man. Justin Vernon is their secret weapon — by unleashing him upon the world and using both mainstream and alternative rock critics as their helpless puppets, they are planning to disorient us, confuse us, corrupt and subjugate our aesthetic values and ultimately plunge the world into so much confusion that Kanye West might be able to become president and give the launch codes to Somali pirates, while we're all busy discussing Bon Iver's latest message to humanity. And these song titles? Aren't they already imprinted in your mind like proper subliminal messages, to be activated by the New Or­der at just the right moment?

So even if I'm assuming the highly ungrateful role of Cassandra here, I will still go out and say it, and maybe one or two of you nuclear survivors will have the opportunity to thank me ten or so years from now: to a certain extent, the sound and image of 22, A Million was predictable, be­cause when somebody's search for new and unprecedented ways of self-expression overrides one's talent so mercilessly, the results look something like this. Of course, a radical turn into the direction of sampling, Auto-tuning, and crossbreeding neo-folk with electronica was inevitable for this guy, although the scope of it couldn't have been properly guessed. And, of course, the pro­cess of such cross-breeding was far more important to him than actually caring that the record made some sort of sense. And why bother crafting a record that would make some sort of sense, anyway, if fans and critics alike will be all too happy to invent it for you?

Here, have some frickin' quotes. "22, A Million is comparatively strange and exploratory, but its worries are more existential... nearly all of its songs contain a question of some sort, as if Vernon’s own reckoning with the inevitability of decay has led him to interrogate every last thing he’s seen or known" (Pitchfork). "The wonder of 22, A Million is how beautifully he melds the disparate forms—inside and outside, acoustic and digital, past and future, ground level and interstellar" (Spin). "With his long-awaited third album, Vernon completely breaks from his guitar-hugging persona, leaving it in the woods like a Coen brothers corpse as he flexes a mastery of processed vocals, samples, loops, beats, synths and noise, along with more familiar trappings" (RollingStone)... you get the drift already, don't you?

So it's either Illuminati or the man found some serious Al Capone stash buried right under his log cabin, with which he was able to buy up all the significant media sources — because, while I did honestly try to entertain, nurture, and re-kindle the possibility of this being, like, you know, a good album after all, even over the course of several listens... well, gut instincts don't lie: just as in the case of his prior two albums, each new listen only brought an additional wave of disgust, so at least in that respect he's demonstrating a delightful stability. And yes, maybe it is just me and I am still not getting something about all this, but so far, not a single one of these reviews has taken even a tiny step towards convincingly clarifying what that «something» could be.

Roughly speaking, 22, A Million is an alien-dimensional take on neo-folk, consisting of three steps: (a) write some fairly bland, hookless, nowhere-near-innovative melodies on the intersec­tion of rootsy Americana and New Age; (b) fill 'em up with lyrics that can barely pass the Turing test, but might serve as fodder for lengthy, bloody battles of interpretation; (c) twist, distort, cut up, paste the material with as many technological devices and in as many different ways as your engineer might suggest. As Pitchfork says, "nearly all of its songs contain a question of some sort", and they do, oh yes they do. For instance: "Why is the accappella melody of ʽ715ʼ com­pletely hidden under a wall of Autotune?" (Oh, excuse me, that's not Autotune proper, it's some brand-ass-new device called ʽthe Messinaʼ after the name of Vernon's engineer. I'm sure this technical detail makes a lot of artistic difference). Lo and behold, now your life has meaning, because you can spend the rest of it answering that question.

But to return to that old crudeness and bluntness: The melodies on 22, A Million lack memora­bility or originality (I don't think there's really a single chord sequence on here that could not have been used up by the likes of a James Taylor sometime in the past — and, as much as I remain skeptical of the overall artistic merit of Sufjan Stevens, that guy does everything that Bon Iver is capable of and much, much more). The lyrics make no sense whatsoever, except for a few individual lines, and the individual lines are usually nauseatingly pretentious ("Must've been forces that took me on them wild courses / Who knows how many poses that I've been in" — un­less he's been Napoleon in one of his past lives, I'm not prepared to buy this), and it is self-un­derstood that humor and self-irony will be prosecuted if they ever find themselves on Justin Vernon's property. And the «special effects», beginning with the triumphant Unicode of the song titles and ending with all the psychedelic / futuristic / faux-avantgarde sampling and encoding, are little more than annoying. Most of the time, it simply sounds like a kid having fun with his laptop. The kid will find it delightful to turn his voice into a chipmunk's every now and then, but there's simply no reason whatsoever for a grown-up person to do so on the very first line of the very first song and then pretend that it has some artistic significance — or, worse still, prod us into disco­vering, intellectually-symbolically or emotionally-supernaturally, that significance.

If the first album was simply boring, and the second album was intolerable because it intentio­nally presented obsolete crappy values as the new Art, then the third one is simply an anti-artis­tic scam — a new low in an already fantastically atrocious career. So why is it that, out of all the gazillions of «experimental» albums released every year, people were ready to fall specifically for this one? Is it the Kanye West endorsement? Is it some sort of irresistible tug that you get when you take two of the most fashionable things of the past decade — the folksy bearded loner and the digital studio processing technology — and mash them together with full force? Is it that the words he chooses for his songs hit some sort of generational nerve, and that his arrangement of these words actually carries a manipulative effect? Or is it simply that so many of us have such a mad craving for a soft, whiny, vulnerable falsetto to take as a partner in weeping over the dis­heveled and confused state of the world? So much so, that even when that falsetto is distorted with five billion layers of Autotune, we take this as a symbolic representation of all the unbea­rable burdens and unsolvable problems that pin the Vulnerable Little Man down to the ground? Oh look at me, I'm almost beginning to rant like a Pitchfork reviewer already.

Whatever — I say shake off the haze, cut the crap, and call this one of the most stupid, misguided, and phoney albums of the year 2016. If you want some actual folksy sadness that sounds real, for a change, go listen to True Sadness by the Avett Brothers, who lay no claims whatsoever to Big Fat Innovation, do not put dumb effects on their voices, hardly ever use one special symbol from the user-defined area in their song titles, yet somehow seem to pack more emotion and plain old common sense in a single song than Justin Vernon manages to smear over half an hour of his «muzak of the future». Sure, there's nothing adventurous whatsoever about True Sadness, but when it comes to choosing between (a) sitting in front of the fireplace and sipping hot tea on a cold evening, or (b) wrapping your wife's panties around your head and jogging through the Mojave desert in a pokemon suit, I happen to be the kind of guy who chooses (a). Although, add choice (c) — sit through 22, A Million just one more time in hopes of finally penetrating its transcendental nature — and choice (b) begins to look a bit more promising. I suppose it's only natural that the thumbs down verdict here not be subject to any further appeal.