Buzzcocks: A Different Kind Of Tension

BUZZCOCKS: A DIFFERENT KIND OF TENSION (1979)

1) Paradise; 2) Sitting Round At Home; 3) You Say You Don't Love Me; 4) You Know You Can't Help It; 5) Mad Mad Judy; 6) Raison D'Etre; 7) I Don't Know What To Do With My Life; 8) Money; 9) Hollow Inside; 10) A Diffe­rent Kind Of Tension; 11) I Believe; 12) Radio Nine.

Not too different, though — same band, same label, same producer, and it's not as if the Seventies were past us, anyway. On both of their previous LPs, the Buzzcocks tried to be a little more than just a «punk» or a «pop» band, and here they continue in the same vein, alternating between short, catchy, flashy statements and extended workouts that thrive on glorious monotonousness. Not everything is equally effective, but, hell, nothing can be on a record like this.

Indeed, the opening track, ʽParadiseʼ, despite its declarative anthemic nature, is their least re­markable lead-in number so far — no serious vocal hook, recycled riffage, and a minimalistic instrumental break that just consists of moving the same riff up and down the scale a bit, exactly the kind of stuff that used to seriously turn me off of classic era punk rock. You might think they're beginning to run out of ideas, but no, this is not the case: already the second song, ʽSitting Round At Homeʼ, runs a few small, but nice experiments with rapid tempo changes, where the slow parts are correlated with the grumbly nagging mantra "sitting round at home, sitting round at home, watching the pictures go" and the fast breaks probably correspond to the fast'n'furious brain activity of the title character. Nothing great, but fun.

The band's experiments with minimalism continue with ʽMad Mad Judyʼ, shot off at a break­neck tempo and, once the barking lyrics are over, left with nothing but its fast, simple bass riff for a couple minutes; they become somewhat excessive with ʽHollow Insideʼ, which is arguably their most «Goth» sounding number so far, but completely tongue-in-cheek — slow it down and get Robert Smith to sing it, and you got yourself a suicidal mantra, but at this tempo it is clearly paro­dic, more like a mocking test of how much time you can stand Shelley repeating "hollow inside, I was hollow inside". I must say that my own patience got exhausted by the second listen.

But honestly, the record really hits gold only with the last two tracks. The title song, with its quasi-martial use of power chords and endless list of robotically delivered nouns and imperatives, has a certain prophetic je ne sais quoi — it sounds neither too humorous nor too serious, but is easily the most insistent track in the band's catalog, knocking on your door like a merciless police raid; they also put electronic effects on some of the vocals, acknowledging the arrival of New Wave and the robotic nature of The System at the same time. And then there's ʽI Believeʼ, whose seven-minute length is justified by several different sections and an inherent contradiction — on one hand, "I believe in the workers' revolution /  And I believe in the final solution", sung in a cheerful and optimistic manner, on the other, "There is no love in this world any more", screamed out over and over like a slogan to a solitary aching chord.

In between all these mini- and maxi-experiments, there are some good old-timey pop-punk ditties about good love and bad love, but we're not going to talk about them because they're on the level of the «just okay» segment of Singles Going Steady, not the «really frickin' great» segment. In­stead, I'll just conclude, with a modest thumbs up for accompaniment, that the album fairly strictly follows the Buzzcocks formula — and it's already getting a wee bit tiresome on the whole and a wee bit irksome in particular places, but they still have fun ideas and have not had time to descend into self-parody. Which, of course, implies that breaking up instead of finalizing their fourth album was the perfectly reasonable thing to do at the time. Ever heard Pete Shelley's Sky Yen? Had that been released as a Buzzcocks album, that'd be one hell of a change, like an entire Beatles record with nothing but ʽRevolution No. 9ʼ clones on it. But it wouldn't get a thumbs up from me, nosiree, uh-uh.

Buffalo Springfield: Buffalo Springfield

BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD: BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD (1966)

1) Go And Say Goodbye; 2) Sit Down I Think I Love You; 3) Leave; 4) Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing; 5) Hot Dusty Roads; 6) Everybody's Wrong; 7) Flying On The Ground Is Wrong; 8) Burned; 9) Do I Have To Come Right Out And Say It; 10) Baby Don't Scold Me; 11) Out Of My Mind; 12) Pay The Price; 13*) For What It's Worth.

Listening to Buffalo Springfield's debut in the context of everything that surrounded it in those bubbling fall days of 1966, one thing that might strike you is how decidedly non-psychedelic, perhaps even anti-psychedelic it is. It is possible that some people back then might have thought of Buffalo Springfield as «yet another second-rate Byrds imitator», but the Byrds themselves were strongly bitten by the psychedelic vibe that year, writing songs about spacemen and playing trippy Coltrane-influenced guitar solos — leaving their second-rate imitators to lay the strongest claim for «best roots-rock album» of the year, even if the term «roots-rock» did not exist back then («rock» being still way too young to feel the need for any «roots»).

Of course, it's not as if Stephen Stills, Neil Young, or Richie Furay had any ideological issues with psychedelia, and, um, «for what it's worth», Neil occasionally includes a bit of droning, and every once in a while, they fuss around with special effects on their guitar sounds, from simple fuzz to trickier tricks (Leslie speakers?); since the word «psychedelic» can be adapted to a very wide variety of meanings, you could try and make a good case for this record as well. But that would most likely be an exercise in sophism: Buffalo Springfield is, first and foremost, just an unassuming collection of well-written songs from a couple of young kids enthralled at the per­spective of merging together simple pop melodies, age-old folk tradition, and relevant-contem­porary verbal meaning. The Beatles, The Byrds, and Bob Dylan circa 1965 being their mentors in this exciting business.

A certain amount of record executive pressure is felt here — namely in the circumstance that most of Neil Young's songs are being sung by Richie Furay; the powers that be imperatively de­cided that Furay was incompetent as a songwriter (and it's not as if they were totally wrong on that one), but also that Young was way too weird as a singer (come to think of it, they were sort of right about that, too, except that «weird is good» in the artistic paradigm), and this is why you don't get to hear Neil's own take on ʽFlying On The Ground Is Wrongʼ until you get around to some of his solo live shows. But that ain't much of a problem — Furay is a lovely singer indeed, and since electric folk rock in 1966 was still largely associated with the earthy sweetness of Roger McGuinn and the other Byrds, it is understandable how Neil's high-pitched «womanly whine» would be deemed un-commercial.

The good news is that Stills and Young already come up to the table as competent songwriters. While there is a certain level of simplicity and innocence to these songs that would gradually be ushered out by professionalism, Buffalo Springfield does not feel like a generic Byrds rip-off. Some of the songs, especially Stills', do come across as sort of formulaic pop — but it is still an inventive formula. ʽGo And Say Goodbyeʼ plays out like a country dance tune, with three diffe­rently toned guitar parts that all try to sound like interlocking banjos — however, the verse and chorus vocal melodies are sheer Beatles (in fact, the verse melody is reminiscent of Harrison's ʽYou Like Me Too Muchʼ, and the first verse talks about "the night before" — subconscious on the rampage!), and even if that may not sound like much, the song immediately establishes a solid special case for the Buffalo Springfield — where the Byrds usually tended to have a fully integ­rated sound, these guys actually sound like they're competing against each other from the very beginning. A folk rock band with «feuding» members? Now we're talking!

Of the two songwriters, Young immediately comes across as the «deeper» one, an impression that would, of course, be maintained forever on — and an impression largely conditioned by the fact that the man was probably depressed and psychologically wounded already as an embryo in his mother's womb, which is why he is able to contribute a whole set of credible downers (ʽNow­adays Clancy...ʼ, ʽFlying On The Ground Is Wrongʼ, ʽBurnedʼ, ʽOut Of My Mindʼ — even the titles speak for themselves) at the tender age of 21. Even his solitary love song on the album, ʽDo I Have To Come Right Out And Say Itʼ, is an under-the-bed serenade from somebody who's way too insecure and afraid to tell anyone that he wants to hold her hand. Unfortunately, no Neil Young-sung version of the song seems to exist, which is a pity, because Furay sounds the refrain so tenderly and sweetly that it must have won the band quite a bit of female fans! (But they'd all be Furay's, of course. Damn that Neil and his "indecision").

Stills provides the perfect extravert counterpart to Young's introverted character — passionate and permutable as hell: one minute he asks you to ʽSit Down I Think I Love Youʼ, then the very next moment you already have to ʽLeaveʼ because all it took for the I-love-you obsession to turn into I-hate-you rage was one small record groove. He also pays a little more attention to song structure and hooks, where Neil seems more concerned with overtones and atmospherics, and the two of them strike a great balance so that the record neither threatens to drown in watery melan­cholia nor to float away on the fluffy pop hook breeze.

But the real value almost always lies in the potential of this band as a guitar outfit — not a lot of pop bands around that time had two lead guitarists in the group with two distinct styles: ʽSit Down I Think I Love Youʼ, if anything, is priceless already for its doubled guitar break, first with Neil playing a grungy ʽSatisfactionʼ-esque fuzz solo, then Stills cutting in with a soft, fluent, playful country guitar part representing the other side of the protagonist's split personality. They also have a sense of intertextual humor — right in the middle of the rocking ʽBaby Don't Scold Meʼ, for just one bar, the riff from the Beatles' ʽDay Tripperʼ makes a guest appearance out of the blue, in addition to the song featuring some raga-influenced guitar playing (which, I guess, makes it the most proverbially «psychedelic» number here, although that's not saying much). Why? Be­cause we can, that's why.

Actually, checking the dates, I see that most of the songs here were recorded already after the boys must have had heard Revolver — but they were almost certainly written when the band's freshest Beatles impressions were still from Help! and Rubber Soul, and it is amusing, in that respect, that Stills' ʽPay The Priceʼ, with its fast tempo and mildly threatening lyrics, closes the album in much the same fashion that ʽRun For Your Lifeʼ closed Rubber Soul. Which is to say, a somewhat underwhelming and totally non-conceptual coda, but at least we don't see Stills promoting womanslaughter (maybe he'd love to, but Atlantic Records wouldn't let him anyway). And which is also to say that Buffalo Springfield, as a whole, was not quite «on the cutting edge» when it came out in December 1966 — for that matter, were Buffalo Springfield ever «on the cutting edge»? — but who cares, when you've got these two interesting and so significantly different personalities pooling their talents, Lennon-Mc-Cartney-wise, on the same record?

Trivia time: in typical American fashion, the record was mutilated just three months later, as a new re-release took the band's newly successful single ʽFor What It's Worthʼ and inserted it as the lead-off track at the expense of ʽBaby Don't Scold Meʼ — as if there weren't enough free space on the frickin' LP to allow for 13 tracks instead of 12. Of course, ʽFor What It's Worthʼ is not just an insanely catchy song, but it also represents a certain «maturity stage» for Stills (he'd already tried the «serious approach» with ʽEverybody's Wrongʼ on the original LP, but it wasn't very memorable and sort of got lost in between all of his love songs and all of Neil's mopey mini-epics), and in a way, it feels a little out of place on the record (imagine the Beatles replacing ʽDrive My Carʼ with ʽTomorrow Never Knowsʼ, or starting Sgt. Pepper off with ʽRevolutionʼ), making the decision completely commercially motivated. That said, there's really no conceptual side to the structuring of the record anyway — and those mysterious ping... ping notes in the intro, followed by the most delicately phrased and intoned "there's something happening here..." in the history of world-changing pop music, still arguably remain Buffalo Springfield's greatest contri­bution to humanity, as boring and trivial as that judgement might seem to fans of Poco. Oh, and big thumbs up, of course.

Brian Eno (w. Robert Fripp): The Equatorial Stars

BRIAN ENO: THE EQUATORIAL STARS (w. Robert Fripp) (2004)

1) Meissa; 2) Lyra; 3) Tarazed; 4) Lupus; 5) Ankaa; 6) Altair; 7) Terebellum.

Long time no see! The last «Fripp & Eno» album had been released almost thirty years ago, even though, technically, the two sonic wizards still managed to cross creative paths every now and then. Lots of water under the bridge, too, and while the title of this third full-scale collaboration also happens to have the word star in it, the album has very little in common with Evening Star, or, in fact, with anything that you'd normally associate with Robert Fripp.

Genre-wise, this here is not «noise», or «drone»: The Equatorial Stars, a record dedicated to the still, visibly immanent beauty and mystery of those little lighted dots above our heads, is a 100% ambient record, focusing on static atmosphere much more than on any sort of musical develop­ment. And old man Robert seems perfectly content here to stick to a quiet, inobtrusive, repetitive style of playing, without any dynamic pre-planning of where a particular guitar melody is sup­posed to go or how it could gradually and subtly gain in intensity. In other words, a perfect setup is made for one of the most boring albums ever released — a record in which Robert Fripp, the demon hero of ʽ21st Century Schizoid Manʼ, signs a contract with your local airport.

Strangely, though, the setup works, and scrolling up to see which was the previous Brian Eno ambient album that I liked to a comparable degree, I stopped at Apollo, which was hardly sur­prising — it's like The Equatorial Stars simply forgets about everything Eno did in between 1983 and 2004, and acts as a logical sequel to that mini-masterpiece. Only instead of grizzly Canadian bear Daniel Lanois you get clean-cut English gentleman Robert Fripp, who never forgets to wear a freshly starched collar under that space suit. Do they offer five o'clock tea on Meissa? Probably not, which is why they had to visit all the other stars as well.

Actually, Fripp as a contributor to the frozen field of ambient turns out to be surprisingly efficient. On ʽMeissaʼ, set against Brian's twinkle-twinkle-little-star droplets of electronic keyboards, he plays a minimalistic bass-heavy humming solo, which often sounds as if someone were really slowly bowing a cracked old cello with just one string on it — and the two parts merge together blissfully, as if Eno's high-pitched sounds were «life», Fripp's low-grumbling solo were «death», and everything else was trapped in between. Or if you think that's pretty far-fetched, you can just return to the usual idea of various types of aliens roaming the galaxy. Small, hasty, fussy ones engineered by Eno and large, slow, grumbly ones manipulated by Fripp.

The formula is repeated in a number of similar, but slightly different ways throughout the record, and it's not as if every track here has its own face: in fact, your conscience will probably only be slightly altered with ʽAltairʼ, where we have some programmed percussion and a surprisingly funky, though very faintly mixed, rhythm track — hello from the age of Nerve Net? — that might just as well not be present. Maybe they got it from a reliable source in the astrological com­munity that the population on Altair is particularly fond of nightclubbing, but more likely, they just had this rhythm track lying around by accident and they thought that it would be a nice inci­dental way to confound some people's expectations. Because it doesn't really matter — what matters are those little whistling flushes and flusters of guitar-like keyboards and keyboard-like guitars, probably representing the careless (and purposeless) spirits of all your dead ancestors who were seduced by low rent costs on Altair over the millennia. The rhythm track is just an echo of the irritating boombox that one of the brothers forgot to turn off.

Anyway, to me it all seems like a decent return to ambient form by Eno, and a startling side pro­ject for Fripp — unlike those two early albums, Equatorial Stars may not lay any claim to any sort of innovation, but it is still a somewhat different project, and it actually makes an even colder, an even more dangerous and impenetrable place out of open space than Apollo ever did. It seems too busy to get everything possible out of just one type of atmospheric texture to be really com­parable to Apollo — but it does achieve what it set out to do. Probably the best way to experience it, though, would be by blasting it at full volume into the sky on a particularly clear and starry night while lying on your back in the grass and trying to remember as many constellation names as your memory allows you to carry. This will bring you one step closer to rupturing the space­time continuum, I'm sure, and you'll never want to worry about the little things again.

Bruce Springsteen: Tracks

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: TRACKS (1972-1995/1998)

CD I: 1) Mary Queen Of Arkansas; 2) It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City; 3) Growin' Up; 4) Does This Bus Stop At 82nd Street?; 5) Bishop Danced; 6) Santa Ana; 7) Seaside Bar Song; 8) Zero And Blind Terry; 9) Linda Let Me Be The One; 10) Thundercrack; 11) Rendezvous; 12) Give The Girl A Kiss; 13) Iceman; 14) Bring On The Night; 15) So Young And In Love; 16) Hearts Of Stone; 17) Don't Look Back.

CD II: 1) Restless Nights; 2) A Good Man Is Hard To Find (Pittsburgh); 3) Roulette; 4) Dollhouse; 5) Where The Bands Are; 6) Loose Ends; 7) Living On The Edge Of The World; 8) Wages Of Sin; 9) Take 'Em As They Come; 10) Be True; 11) Ricky Wants A Man Of Her Own; 12) I Wanna Be With You; 13) Mary Lou; 14) Stolen Car; 15) Born In The U.S.A.; 16) Johnny Bye-Bye; 17) Shut Out The Light.

CD III: 1) Cynthia; 2) My Love Will Not Let You Down; 3) This Hard Land; 4) Frankie; 5) TV Movie; 6) Stand On It; 7) Lion's Den; 8) Car Wash; 9) Rockaway The Days; 10) Brothers Under The Bridges ('83); 11) Man At The Top; 12) Pink Cadillac; 13) Two For The Road; 14) Janey Don't You Lose Heart; 15) When You Need Me; 16) The Wish; 17) The Honeymooners; 18) Lucky Man.

CD IV: 1) Leavin' Train; 2) Seven Angels; 3) Gave It A Name; 4) Sad Eyes; 5) My Lover Man; 6) Over The Rise; 7) When The Lights Go Out; 8) Loose Change; 9) Trouble In Paradise; 10) Happy; 11) Part Man, Part Monkey; 12) Goin' Cali; 13) Back In Your Arms; 14) Brothers Under The Bridge.

Ohgodohgodohgod, how am I ever gonna do this. Okay, let's put it into personal perspective: I write a new review almost every day, and never ever would I want to defend each and every one of these texts as «insightful», «original», or even properly written (let alone the fact that I never have much time for proofreading). Even if all the records I was writing about were dazzlingly original and adventurous, I'd still end up repeating myself, falling back on stock phrases, under­whelmed on bad days, and overhyped on good days. It is a routine process, after all, and routine eats away inspiration and insight like a termite infestation.

Tracks, a monster 4-CD boxset of (mostly) previously unissued material that Bruce prepared in the late 1990s, may be a coveted treasure house for fans — but to me, it shows, first and foremost, that for Bruce, the art of «songwriting», too, was a very routine process. Of course, it's not as if he came up with a new song every day of his life, but during numerous periods in his life, he generated them with the speed of a well-written spammer script; and the sheer number of these tunes that had to be locked in the vaults, biding their time, shows that the «Springsteen formula», which we really saw originate on Darkness On The Edge Of Town and reach sexual maturity on The River, actually worked with twice, if not thrice, the efficiency that we could suspect by listening to the officially released stuff.

If you were ever worried about all that generic filler on The River; if you were ever troubled about the formulaic, simplistic approach to melodies and arrangements on Born In The USA; if you ever felt like The Boss was dumbing down and/or copy-pasting the hooks on Tunnel Of Love or Human Touch — all of your worries, troubles, and suspicions will be fully confirmed with this 60+ item set of second-hand tunes. It is instructive that out of 4 discs, 1 is given up al­most entirely to outtakes from The River, 1 consists of leftovers from Born In The USA and Tunnel Of Love, and 1 is allocated to the Human Touch/Lucky Town period — which leaves only one disc to all of the Seventies, a decade when Bruce's «gigantomania» extended not just to the big sound of The E Street Band, but also covered the fields of lyrics (which were more com­plex), melodies (which were more jazzy and experimental), and song structures (which used to have fare more intros, codas, and internal development than any of his post-1978 stuff).

It is also precisely on that one disc, as soon as you pass a bunch of forgettable (historical interest only) early acoustic demos of well-known songs, that you get to encounter the best and least ob­vious material — compositions over which you can actually lament that they were taken off the respective albums for space reasons (although nowadays, with the CD format, there's always room for them if they ever want to come back). The most obvious highlight is ʽThundercrackʼ, an eight-minute epic that was probably cut from The Wild in favor of ʽRosalitaʼ, another long and even more exuberant track admiring a lady's charms, but even though ʽRosalitaʼ is faster, rowdier, and would always constitute a better turn-on for concert audiences, ʽThundercrackʼ may actually be its musical superior — especially when the band gets to the lengthy instrumental passage and starts cracking out terrific lead riffs, one after another, with occasional support from Clarence's ever-helping sax. There's some delicate subtlety and exquisite romance in this song that very rarely cropped up in Bruce's songs even in the early days, and then disappeared forever once he made the complete transition to arena-rock mode.

A much less popular, but very unusual and offbeat inclusion from those days is ʽBishop Dancedʼ, a rough-rugged folk-dance tune driven by acoustic guitar and accordeon and slightly reminiscent of The Band — the recording is live, taken from an early 1973 show at Max's Kansas City, and, judging by the audience's lively response, stuff like this could excite small crowds just as strong­ly as ʽBorn To Runʼ would later excite large crowds. Well, maybe not quite, but still — it's fun seeing him stringing together these off-the-wall lines of chaotic imagery, still very much influen­ced by Dylan but also still trying to experiment with musical form, putting his own stamp on the folk dance genre, way before turning into the predictable «working class champion».

That said, even for those early days you can easily see why stuff like ʽSanta Anaʼ or ʽZero And Blind Terryʼ were left off the final product — they're okay, but they add nothing extra to the moods and vibes that are already there. And as time goes by, these «superfluous» tunes become more and more the norm — for just about any track here past ʽThundercrackʼ you can pinpoint one or two officially released songs that said all the same things and more, or better. Do believe me when I insist that you will not discover any hidden sides of The Boss by listening to these songs, even if I also have to admit that there are almost no stylistic embarrassments or openly bad / dumb material included (well, maybe "Ricky's almost grown, Ricky wants a man of her own" comes close to dumb, but it's really just one of those Fifties-imitating nostalgic teen-pop numbers that he really had a crush on in 1980).

The relative consistency of these songs facilitates the listening process — I sat through the entire hog twice, which would be a real chore for most 4-CD collections of outtakes, but this one went surprisingly easy — however, I just don't feel like talking about the songs: whatever I'd have to say was already probably said in conjunction with some other song. To fill space, here are just some random observations: (A) I don't mind that ʽSo Young And In Loveʼ borrows the intro from ʽLawdy Miss Clawdyʼ, but how come ʽGive The Girl A Kissʼ is so blatantly influenced by Fleet­wood Mac's ʽDon't Stopʼ? The intro and outro are simply lifted from that song, almost as if the man had a subconscious desire for some of that Rumours gold to rub off on himself; (B) the Ne­braska-era acoustic demo of ʽBorn In The USAʼ has a vibe amusingly similar to ʽState Trooperʼ and is so totally tragically paranoid that one can only think how hilarious it would have been if Reagan's advisors got the man to consent to lend them the song — in this version; (C) ʽMy Love Will Not Let You Downʼ was one rejected song from the Born In The USA sessions that Bruce actually salvaged for his concerts, and although here it sports the ugly dated early Eighties synth sound, it is still gloriously anthemic and somewhat exceptional; (D) ʽFrankieʼ is a weird 7-minute long epic that I would have never guessed was also a Born In The USA outtake — it's a winding epic tale of Born To Run proportions (perhaps Bruce reminded himself in time that it was too melodically similar to ʽThunder Roadʼ), though, again, not vastly original.

And that's pretty much it. I would find any attempts to pick «bad» and «good» songs here so subjective and depending on such thin nuances that I'd much rather discuss angels dancing on the head of a pin. Clearly, this is first and foremost «for the fans»; Dylan's Bootleg Series, whose popularity may have inspired Bruce to follow suit, at least had a small bunch of major lost gems on each of its discs, whereas Tracks is far more evenly «mediocre» (people often complain about the last disc or the last two discs being inferior to the rest, but these are people who like to ima­gine a huge qualitative gap between Born To Run and Born In The USA — I am not so sure it was that huge in the first place), and simply offers «more of the same» for those who'd like to have more of the same. But it ends up putting the reviewer in a bad position, and I don't want to be one of those guys who can exude the same glowing intonations for a bunch of outtakes as they can for a genuine paradigm-shifting masterpiece.

Bottomline: I genuinely enjoyed listening to this, but no spiritual revelations ever manifested — and that is even if we define «spiritual revelation» in the broadest possible sense, like including frenetically banging my head against the wall to the bulgy sound of ʽCadillac Ranchʼ. Didn't really find no ʽCadillac Ranchesʼ here, either.

Buddy Guy: Buddy And The Juniors

BUDDY GUY: BUDDY AND THE JUNIORS (1970)

1) Talkin' 'Bout Women Obviously; 2) A Motif Is Just A Riff (Riffin'); 3) Buddy's Blues; 4) (I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man; 5) Five Long Years; 6) Rock Me Mama; 7) Ain't No Need.

This probably is not at all the sort of record one would normally associate with Buddy Guy, Hot Lover of Electric Blues Guitar — a minimalistic, all-acoustic session with Buddy on guitar, Junior Wells on harmonica and, sure enough, one more Junior (Mance) on piano joining the two better known legends on the third track and sticking with them to the end. The whole thing pretty much came about by accident (producer Michael Cuscuna «tricked» Vanguard Records into holding the session so that they could also back up a regular Buddy Guy album which he also produced), and you know how professional music critics love such accidents — the record gets nothing but rave reviews, even if few of the rave reviewers probably get the urge to listen to it again once they get all the admiration off their chests.

In all honesty, there is nothing particularly special about the session. As an «unplugged» player, Buddy is okay, but neither his technique nor his inventiveness on the instrument would put him on the level of those Delta veterans for whom the acoustic guitar was the instrument — much like Hendrix becomes «just okay» when you hear him play acoustic. When they get down to soloing or jamming, it is mostly Junior Wells' harmonica that occupies the spotlight, and even if the guy had superb technique and expressivity on the level of Little Walter or Sonny Boy Williamson, it could be a chore to sit through for 40 minutes; and he is actually slightly below these fellas when it comes to «blowpower» or musical phrasing, although sometimes he makes cool counterpoints to Buddy's vocal lines (the "black night... black night" section on ʽFive Long Yearsʼ, for instance, when the harmonica «fades in» and «whooshes» past you like a spirit in the night).

Mostly, the record is about attitude; the first track is a ten-minute 12-bar improvisation where the chuckling, the whispering, the occasionally quivering vocalizing, the minimalistic syncopation are much more important than the nearly non-existent melody or the totally irrelevant lyrics. On the second track, Buddy does indeed play the same acoustic riff over and over again, with Wells either picking it up on harmonica or veering off on a tangent — and despite the simplicity, they do manage to create the atmosphere of some important shamanistic ritual, as if nagging and nag­ging and nagging away at that riff were sure to eventually restore balance to the universe. It helps that the riff itself is mysteriously bass-heavy, and Buddy's occasional grunts give the illusion that playing it is about as difficult as lifting heavy weights, but no pain, no gain — it's not that easy to restore balance to the universe, you know.

The atmosphere actually dissipates a little bit when the piano player joins in and the trio begins playing more predictable classics like ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ and ʽFive Long Yearsʼ. Some critics praise Junior Mance's piano playing here to high heaven — I don't know, I think he's just keeping his end up fairly well, but comparisons with Otis Spann are unjustified, since this guy has neither the fluency nor the coolness and confidence of Otis (for actual comparison, refer to A Man And The Blues, where Otis made the record shine in all those places where Buddy was not able to — this piano playing, in comparison, does little for me except providing some extra rhyth­mic support and clogging up one recording track). Worst of all is when they decide to close the session with a boogie piece (ʽAin't No Needʼ), and Mance plays like two or three different notes throughout, with Wells as your only hope for some nitty-gritty stuff, and it's not even as if he were doing his best, either.

Ultimately, this is a disappointment — I admire Buddy, and Junior Wells can be a delightfully bad blues guy when he really gets into that spirit, but here they seem to be holding a «who of us can get more low-key?» competition, which starts out as subtly atmospheric but then rapidly pro­gresses into boringly non-atmospheric. Unless you believe that any acoustic session between two blues heroes automatically deserves a thumbs up, I see no big reason to bother here, although, as a historical document, Buddy And The Juniors probably has its place in the annals of Superstar Meetings. Decent acoustic blues, if nothing else.

Battles: La Di Da Di

BATTLES: LA DI DA DI (2015)

1) The Yabba; 2) Dot Net; 3) FF Bada; 4) Summer Simmer; 5) Cacio E Pepe; 6) Non-Violence; 7) Dot Com; 8) Tyne Wear; 9) Tricentennial; 10) Megatouch; 11) Flora > Fauna; 12) Luu Le.

Well, the third Battles album is here, and the main difference is that this time, they have omitted vocals altogether. Which is a plus — because they used to know a million ways of making vocals sound annoying and irritating — but also a minus, because without the vocals, Battles move even closer to the status of a «pure intellectual construct» than ever before. Now they just play robot-engineered progressive rock, which is all right for a world soon-to-be populated with robots, but not quite all right for a world still populated with organic brains.

That said, in the long run it might be a noble decision, and not just because the time of our being overrun with robots is nigh at hand (I have no idea, really), but also because in this way, they have intentionally and viciously massacred all hopes for a «pop» career in an epoch when even the deepest and subtlest performers can hardly withstand such a temptation. I mean, maybe ʽIce Creamʼ and ʽAtlasʼ could still hope to find some sort of mass audience, but ʽThe Yabbaʼ and ʽFF Badaʼ, released as singles from this album, will shoo away people with their titles first, their lack of vocals second, and the "Oh! I thought they were cool clubbin' weirdos, but apparently they're just weirdos!" reaction nailing the final nails. And that is okay for the 2010s, a time period where the equation «popularity» = «overhyped crap» probably holds truer than ever.

Not that it immediately warms my heart, or should warm anybody's heart, to the music on La Di Da Di. It is consistently interesting and consistently «classy», but there ain't much progress here: Battles are too clever to re-write their melodies, but not too clever to break through their math-rock formulas. It's like the next step after Kraftwerk — Kraftwerk wrote humanistic music from a robotic perspective, and these guys write robotic music from a humanistic perspective. And who can really understand these robots? My best attempts to «visualize» this album see it as a long journey, maybe a digital one, that a pack of very determined, very tightly focused robotic units undertakes from Point A to Point B, crossing various obstacles along the way. In fact, it does sound very much like a soundtrack to an arcade game of jumping, dodging, and hitting, stretched across 12 levels of varying length and complexity.

Few reviews of the album find sufficient strength to dwell in detail on any of the individual tracks, and for a good reason — of all Battles albums so far, this one has the least individuality on any of its tracks, although that does not necessarily make it the worst Battles album so far. I do have to observe that a lot of the tracks are structured like dialogs, usually between a low-pitched guitar, bass, or keyboard and a high-pitched instrument, which is probably this band's attempt to avoid accusations of «pretentiousness» or «indulgence» (such accusations are most commonly associa­ted with lengthy solo passages), but ultimately it makes an even stronger point in support of the «video game soundtrack» interpretation — you can imagine yourself as the high-pitched Hero, and your evil antagonist(s) as the low-pitched bastard(s) that you have to outsmart. And you have exactly 49 minutes and 13 seconds — ready, set, go.

In this capacity — a fun, adventurous, bouncy-bubbly-dynamic pseudo-video game soundtrack — I have no problem issuing a thumbs up rating for the album. I also like the idea that they are still largely using live drums and real guitars, instead of completely giving in to the seduction of electronics: contrary to what some of the reviewers have said, this does not provide «human warmth» to the compositions (because every possible effort has been made to simulate non-hu­ma­nity), but it does provide a certain aura of realism to the proceedings. It's as in, which one do you prefer, a robot behind an actual drumkit or a drum machine? I'd definitely go for the former, although that's just me.

Butthole Surfers: Weird Revolution

BUTTHOLE SURFERS: WEIRD REVOLUTION (2001)

1) The Weird Revolution; 2) The Shame Of Life; 3) Dracula From Houston; 4) Venus; 5) Shit Like That; 6) Mexico; 7) Intelligent Guy; 8) Get Down; 9) Jet Fighter; 10) The Last Astronaut; 11) Yentel; 12) They Came In.

Apparently, the Butthole Surfers' little romance with mainstream popularity did not last long. Despite the relative success of ʽPepperʼ, already their next album, After The Astronaut, fully recorded and ready for pressing, did not pass the Capitol quality test and was rejected, which ul­timately cost them their contract and a lot of nerves. The band did not resurface again until 2001, with a new bass player (Nathan Calhoun), a new manager, a new (smaller) contract, and a totally new musical face — and I am not too sure about how exciting that face was.

Essentially, Butthole Surfers' last ever completed LP is an «alternative hip hop» album, whatever that means. And do get this right: it is not a «Butthole Surfers album with elements of hip hop», which might have been an interesting thing to witness — it is simply as if Haynes and Leary be­came so fascinated with hip-hop culture that they agreed to subject themselves to its rules, where earlier they accepted no rules whatsoever, and trade most of their identity for some collective fetish. Sure, not all of the album is hip- or trip-hop, but much, if not most, is, and those songs that do not accept the trappings of hip-hop sound like generic alt-rock, which is even worse.

Actually, the really worst thing is the unapologetically solemn tone that the album assumes from the very beginning — with that spoken-word announcement dubbed over a boring beat: "On be­half of Dr. Timothy Leary, in association with the legions of illuminated social rejects..." Timo­thy Leary? Timothy Leary's dead, as Ray Thomas told us long before Timothy Leary's physical death, and this whole look-at-me-I'm-so-unbearably-regally-psychedelic stylistics last made sense maybe on some Parliament/Funkadelic records in the mid-1970s. This is just bullshit, as if they are trying to stupefy us with a 30-year old circus program. And no, just because they are trying to hybridize psychedelia with hip-hop does not make this any more forgivable.

As if that weren't enough, the first actual song here, ʽThe Shame Of Lifeʼ, is a collaboration with Kid Rock, which is sufficient reason for criminal prosecution in some well-advanced countries. The lyrics are reasonably intelligent — this is basically a reflection on the hedonistic-excessive nature of hip-hop and its imminent arisal out of the state we're all in ("my shallow mind is just a sign of your game of life") — but the music is limited to a simplistic heavy rock riff and some sound effects scattered around for creepiness' sake. If I didn't know this was a Butthole Surfers composition, I'd never have paid it any mind in the first place. It doesn't help, either, that ʽDracula From Houstonʼ, combining rapped verses with a garage rock riff that had already been used ap­proximately 50,000 times in the past three decades (and that's just the verse — the chorus rips off ʽSmells Like Teen Spiritʼ, if you can believe), is possibly the worst song these guys ever commit­ted to tape. What's up with this commercial pop-punk shit?

All right, I will admit that it does get better as it goes on — ʽGet Downʼ, for instance, is funky as hell, catchy as heck, and funny: its angle comes across as parodic, and at the same time Leary gets to lay across some nice riffs and astral phased-out solos. ʽMexicoʼ, which has nothing to do with Mexico, draws some Eastern melodic overtones across a predominantly electronic arrangement, and makes fun of most of the world's major religions, past and present, in the process. A couple other tracks mix the weird and the normal in acceptable, though not necessarily mind-blowing, proportions. But for every track like that there's a ʽJet Fighterʼ, a surprisingly sincere-sounding piece of anti-war satire with a bland folk-rock arrangement, or a ʽLast Astronautʼ, which is barely listenable because of awful production (the main gimmick is a set of vocal overdubs that were apparently captured from space, and, predictably, they sound like shit).

The main point is: this is not «Butthole Surfers». Bands do change and evolve, sometimes turning into something you could never ever have suspected from them in the beginning — but it's all right as long as the original spirit remains alive. If there is a spirit in Weird Revolution, it is buried so deep under the ice of the synthetic, stiffening production that, for all intents and pur­poses, it may as well be dead. Not only does the record take itself way too seriously (I mean, what the heck? Just because they have embraced hip hop, they think that they now need to tiptoe through the tulips?), but it blocks their individual talents, especially Leary's, and asserts way too much discipline over a world whose main value used to lie in its undisciplined attitude. Maybe it's not awful — but it's a very, very, very disappointing metamorphosis.

And even if the band never officially disbanded (in fact, as a touring outfit, the Surfers were periodically quite active throughout the 2000s), the very fact that Weird Revolution was not followed by anything else is telling — I'm pretty sure that the band understood that it lost its way, creatively, and that under these conditions it would be more prudent to honestly rebrand them­selves as a nostalgia act than to continue this frustrating «modernisation». Come to think of it, the Surfers always were a nostalgic act, from the very beginning — they were always successfully busy carving out the future by peering into the past, and it is only when they began consciously peering into the future that success began to evade them.

Buzzcocks: Singles Going Steady

BUZZCOCKS: SINGLES GOING STEADY (1979)

1) Orgasm Addict; 2) What Do I Get; 3) I Don't Mind; 4) Love You More; 5) Ever Fallen In Love; 6) Promises; 7) Everybody's Happy Nowadays; 8) Harmony In My Head; 9*) You Say You Don't Love Me; 10*) Are Everything; 11*) Strange Thing; 12*) Running Free; 13) What Ever Happened To; 14) Oh Shit!; 15) Autonomy; 16) Noise Annoys; 17) Just Lust; 18) Lipstick; 19) Why Can't I Touch It; 20) Something's Gone Wrong Again; 21*) Raison D'Etre; 22*) Why She's The Girl From The Chainstore; 23*) Airwaves Dream; 24*) What Do You Know.

This compilation of singles was America's (rather belated, as it often happens) introduction to the noisy pop magic of the Buzzcocks, and it has since acquired such a legendary status that I can hardly add any interesting thoughts or observations to what you all already know — other than, perhaps, the curious note that I arrived at this chronologically, and this means that on a sub­con­scious level, the Buzzcocks are as much an «album band» for me as they are a «singles band»: in any case, it is certainly not true that all of their singles are pop genius, or that all of their albums are stuffed with thoughtless filler.

For one thing, the band's first single, ʽOrgasm Addictʼ, once its oh-so-shocking nature quickly wore down, is a really stupid song whose only point seems to be «telling it as it is», rather than coyly hiding behind innuendos, and hardly has any instrumental or vocal appeal — it just intends to strike a common chords with, you know, those of us who do have the problem upon reaching puberty. Which is, well, probably most of us, you know, but even if you never grow out of the problem, you will eventually grow out of the song at least, as it's really no great shakes. In fact, its B-side, ʽWhat Ever Happened To...ʼ, with its first appearance of the band's pop harmonies and its ironic-nostalgic mood, reminding you of the Kinks (think ʽWhere Have All The Good Times Gone?ʼ), is already vastly superior.

Already the second single, ʽWhat Do I Get?ʼ, however, establishes a largely unbreakable pattern: the Buzzocks are a loud pop band rather than a punk band, with a knack for simple, instantly ef­ficient hooks, second to none but the Ramones — nobody could that effectively wedge a slice of weepy sadness ("what do I get, whoah-whoah, what do I get?", with that inimitably plaintive accent on I) into a fast-moving, chainsaw-buzz-driven tune. Also, this time, they are smarter and they place the «offensive» track in B-side position: I have no idea if ʽOh Shitʼ marked the first ever appearance of the word "shit" in a song title, but it certainly must have held the local record for the number of times the word was pronounced, and yes, it does serve as the song's primary hook, which is inventive, but eventually gets a little tiresome.

Some of the songs inevitably overlap with tracks that were already included on previous LPs (re­member, though, that the Americans hadn't heard any of those, so this was probably their first meeting with gems like ʽI Don't Mindʼ or ʽEver Fallen In Loveʼ), but considering the overall wealth of material, that is no big tragedy, and all these songs certainly deserve additional listens. That said, in terms of diversity of approach and subtlety of hooks I would say that the Buzzcocks do not become true «monsters of sound» until 1979 comes along, by which time excellent songs just roll off the conveyer belt, but each one in its individual packaging.

ʽEverybody's Happy Nowadaysʼ combines a cozy folksy verse melody (amusingly similar to the one on Dylan's ʽBuckets Of Rainʼ: compare "life is sad, life is a bust" and "life's an illusion, love is a dream") with a tongue-in-cheek falsetto chorus and a ringing four-note riff that give the song an aura of frailty and fluffiness, clashing with Shelley's sly glam-vocal delivery of the verse. And then you have its B-side, ʽWhy Can't I Touch Itʼ (non-spoiler: you never get to really understand what the "it" is in question, and no, it's not the "it" you're probably thinking of at the moment), stretched out to more than six minutes despite really only having one verse and an embryonic bit of a chorus — but they probably understood that they hit upon such a fine groove, with two gui­tars and a persistent bassline conversing with each other, that they were reluctant to let it go, and it just keeps on pulsating like some enigmatic mantra — I can't properly explain the appeal, but there is definitely something trance-inducing here.

Finally, the Diggle-written and Diggle-sung ʽHarmony In My Headʼ happens to be Henry Rol­lins' favorite Buzzcocks song — probably not because it has the audacity to substitute the required guitar solo for a revised version of Black Sabbath's ʽParanoidʼ riff, but because of Diggle's «visi­onary» lyrics and the song's paradoxical nature, where the lyrical and musical confusion of the verses are stated to be the equivalent of the softly sung, melodically played "harmony in my head" bit of the chorus. Normally, you'd expect the chorus to explode after the already explosive verse — instead, it calms and softens things down, implying that noise is silence, confusion is stability, chaos is order, and the Buzzcocks are really the ghost of Nick Drake in disguise. But no, in reality they still take queues from the Stooges, as you can see from the B-side, ʽSomething's Gone Wrong Againʼ: doesn't that nagging one-note piano line remind you of John Cale's mini­malistic addition to ʽI Wanna Be Your Dogʼ ten years ago? They should have dedicated this one to the Stooges and the Velvets, particularly since I can so imagine Lou Reed grumbling "Tried to find my sock, no good it's lost, something's gone wrong again" on any of the 1967-69 albums.

The 2001 CD reissue of the record has significantly expanded it, trying to preserve the original principle (A-sides on side A, B-sides on side B) by adding one more contemporary single (to no special purpose, since both of its sides would be included on A Different Kind Of Tension) and six more A- and B-sides from their last three singles from the early 1980s, which were originally made available on the EP Parts 1, 2, 3 already in 1981. Unfortunately, those six songs are clearly inferior — not only was the band already disintegrating, suffering from a lack of focus and a sur­plus of heroin, but they were also piss-poorly produced, with an awfully tinny drum sound, plas­tic guitars, and occasional cheesy synth overdubs. There are still some hooks (ʽWhat Do You Knowʼ) and some humor (ʽWhy, She's The Girl From The Chainstoreʼ is worth it for the title alone), but overall, I'd at least suggest re-programming the album in such a way that these tracks do not rupture the near-perfect flow of the original. (You could also try to reprogram the original, for that matter, so that each A-side is paired with its B-side, but that is not crucial, you just get two chronological channels instead of one).

So, is this the best possible Buzzcocks album? in other words, were they a proverbial «singles band»? Honestly, I don't know — their LPs weren't all that «conceptual» in the first place, either. Singles Going Steady does have the benefit of being a compilation, even if nobody selected the material for them, and the B-sides are important, because stuff like ʽWhy Can't I Touch Itʼ and ʽSomething's Gone Wrong Againʼ goes beyond the standard pop-punk formula. Who really cares, though? Those early albums and singles all reflected the same musical philosophy, and all of this stuff is indispensable not just for those interested in the punk fashions of late 1970s Britain, but for all those interested in good music, period. Thumbs up even if you're no longer a sexually frustrated teenager, because there's no better way for even a 70-year old veteran to feel like a sexually frustrated teenager than to dig in to some of these Buzzcock singles.

Bruford: Gradually Going Tornado

BRUFORD: GRADUALLY GOING TORNADO (1980)

1) Age Of Information; 2) Gothic 17; 3) Joe Frazier; 4) Q.E.D.; 5) The Sliding Floor; 6) Palewell Park; 7) Plans For J.D.; 8) Land's End.

More like Gradually Going Tormato, if you know what I mean. The current version of the Wiki­pedia page states that "this album is considered among one of the best albums in the prog­ressive rock/fusion genre", with a reference to a review in the All-Music Guide by a certain Leo Bloom, who probably knows his fusion from a fuse and his prog from a frog, but as much as I'd like to agree that Bill Bruford deserves more exposure and promotion, I'd also like to emphasize that fusion is not always nearly as boring as this record. Really, honestly, there are some truly ex­citing fusion albums out there — this one just does not happen to be one of them.

If you take One Of A Kind as the band's typically generic fusion album, then Gradually Going Tornado differs from it in three respects. First, it's got a less prominent guitarist than Alan Holds­worth (John Clark, who did well enough reproducing Alan's parts live on stage, but who certainly has problems coming up with similar parts on his own). Second, it toys around with the pop scene, including a few cheerful, bouncy, near-danceable fusion-pop hybrids like ʽAge Of In­formationʼ. Third, they probably thought that if they'd add vocals they'd be able to sell more copies, and so their bass player Jeff Berlin begins singing — and he is every bit as awful a voca­list as he is awesome as a bass player (and is it just me, or is he unintentionally singing in the wrong key on some of these songs?).

So it's like... generic fusion, only worse. Yes, the dated late 1970s synthesizer tones are still all over the place (and pardon me for the hyperbole when I say that it is these synthesizer tones that may have «killed» progressive rock far more efficiently than any amount of punk attitude), the directionless jamming is still very much in action, and few, if any, of the tunes are memorable or, in fact, meaningful. The «pop» songs are either dreadful quasi-optimistic anthems with synthe­sized fanfares (ʽAge Of Informationʼ, like the Buggles with more technique, but fewer hooks and no sense of humor), or strange «angry rockers» like ʽGothic 17ʼ, where hard rock, pop, and jazz are mixed in more or less equal dosage and you have no way of understanding what sort of reac­tion the song is supposed to elicit in the first place. The more «progressive» stuff is less embar­ras­sing, but even less memorable, so you don't have much of a choice.

The only thing about this album that I still find cool is Berlin's bass playing — the man is totally killing it even on the worst tracks, so every time I found the experience close to unbearable, I just had to twist my ear channels so that they blocked out everything except the basslines: fast and fluent like Jon Entwistle's, but also betraying professional jazz training (Berklee College of Mu­sic, to be accurate). Could you, please, delete everything else on the tracks and just leave that bass? I am not even impressed by Bruford's drum tracks — next to that fabulous bass, they're just... drums. But why did the guy have to ruin it all by singing over those basslines?

In short, while it is probably possible to gradually convince yourself that the record has its merits, I would suggest disspelling the illusion with a quick listen to Bruford's very next project — the revamped King Crimson would release Discipline just one year later, and show the world what a really inspired and innovative progressive album could sound like in the early 1980s. Compared to other run-of-the-mill fusion records, this one might be «okay», but compared to the best of Yes and King Crimson — two bands, after all, which should be the closest in kin spirit to Bruford — this is a thumbs down all the way.

Brian Eno: Drawn From Life

BRIAN ENO: DRAWN FROM LIFE (w. J. Peter Schwalm) (2001)

1) From This Moment; 2) Persis; 3) Like Pictures, Pt. 1; 4) Like Pictures, Pt. 2; 5) Night Traffic; 6) Rising Dust; 7) Intenser; 8) More Dust; 9) Bloom; 10) Two Voices; 11) Bloom (instrumental).

Definitely an improvement here. Apparently, J. Peter Schwalm is a German experimental musi­cian and composer, primarily a drummer and later on a human synthesizer, combining elements of jazz and electronica to produce some of that sweet music of the future. And considering how much Eno was moving in that direction himself, first with Jah Wobble and then on his own on The Drop, the two guys were probably destined to work together. Or, to put it more accurately, one of those days Eno was destined to work with an electro-jazz guy from Germany — the fact that this guy was J. Peter Schwalm we will ascribe, however, to historic incident.

The pair collaborated first on an esoteric project — an «image album» for a manga (Music For Onmyo-Ji) where the first disc was allocated to a Japanese gagaku ensemble, and the second one featured six Eno/Schwalm compositions. The partners having apparently taken a liking to each other, they decided upon a «proper» follow-up that would be in a position to make more waves, and not only did they carry it through, but they even went as far as to tour in support of the al­bum, which, if I am not mistaken, was Eno's first tour since the faraway days of Roxy Music (although he did have occasional sporadic concert appearances, such as with 801, from time to time) — in­teresting how a totally unknown Peter Schwalm succeeded in dragging him out, where neither Robert Fripp nor David Byrne could do the trick.

In any case, the product of their collaboration is arguably the most... eventful record, let's put it that way, to come out of the Eno camp since at least Wrong Way Up. Formally, it continues his obsession with «unwelcome jazz», but the compositions seem more inspired, meaningful, and dynamic than ever before — not all of them, perhaps, but enough to bring back a little bit of faith in the man, unless it is really Schwalm who's doing all the composing here. Memorable themes, diverse atmospheres, suspenseful build-ups, and, most importantly, that old feeling of getting lost in a surreal, but totally realistic musical world, it's all here to some degree, and without any hints of either forced nostalgia or forced modernization.

The most impressive compositions are arguably the ones that bookmark the album (discounting the brief intro and outro sections) — ʽPersisʼ and ʽBloomʼ. The former, a juxtaposition of Peter's drum'n'bass tracks and Eno's synthesizer textures, is a great example of «suspenseful ambient», as you keep waiting for these chimes and drips to resolve into something creepy, and eventually there is some sort of «intermediate» resolution, when an ominous string riff appears out of no­where and heightens the suspense — dark clouds on the horizon, approaching at an alarming rate, that sort of thing. Of course, the storm itself never comes, but that would be too much to ask for from a guy who is only interested in premonitions.

ʽBloomʼ, on the other hand, is a far more calm, gently-wobbling, trip-hop-influenced track, a careful musical rocking horse with bubbly percussion and a two-note cuckoo-clock-style synth rhythm, somewhere behind which you can distinguish (though hardly understand) the merry pat­ter of a little kid. As a bonus track, the album also adds a purely instrumental version of the same track, but, curiously, it works better with the kid — the contrast, or, rather, the perfect synthesis between the serenity of the lightly orchestrated musical track and the child's cute little noises is endearing without being cloying, and also helps remind us of this charming humanity that infests the best of Eno's works, despite all of their technophilia.

In between the two, there's all sorts of stuff, good and bad: extremely ugly and dated vocal effects on ʽRising Dustʼ, which sounds like somebody having too much fun with Autotune and not min­ding the consequences is something I could easily do without, but ʽNight Trafficʼ is another case of Brian's solemn organ-like keyboard parts and Schwalm's stern, doom-laden basslines well com­plementing each other, and ʽMore Dustʼ has a pretty, if not downright beautiful, minimalistic guitar/keyboard pattern that slowly «drips» on the listener and is much more evocative than any­thing on The Drop (or maybe it is just because in reality, I am charmed out by the equally mini­malistic bass «zoops» that have an entrancing quality to them).

In short, if we are ever to move away from «minimal minimalism» and closer to a world that requires a rhythm section and some musical development, the direction of Drawn From Life is a promising one — it's as if we have Brian slowly awakening from a slump here, correcting the mistakes he'd been guilty of ever since Nerve Net led him closer to the «techno world» and made him forget about his own identity and his own strongest sides. I am not sure if, given the strange strange strange musical standards of ambient, New Age, and all these next-level-of-conscience musical genres of the modern world, this record could be objectively called a «comeback», but in my perso­nal ledger at least, nobody could deny me such a record, or the prerogative of recom­mending the album to all of those people who'd lost their faith in St. Brian ever since the attempt to forgive him for Thursday Afternoon ran into translational difficulties. (That said, if you hap­pened to lose your faith in the man right after Before And After Science, the recommendation still does not apply — intelli-pop music this ain't).

Bruce Springsteen: Hammersmith Odeon, London '75

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: HAMMERSMITH ODEON, LONDON '75 (1975/2006)

1) Thunder Road; 2) Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out; 3) Spirit In The Night; 4) Lost In The Flood; 5) She's The One; 6) Born To Run; 7) The E Street Shuffle; 8) It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City; 9) Backstreets; 10) Kitty's Back; 11) Jungleland; 12) Rosalita (Come Out Tonight); 13) 4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy); 14) Detroit Medley; 15) For You; 16) Quarter To Three.

Although you could theoretically apply the tag «archival release» to Live 1975-85 as well, or at least parts of it, that sprawling monster was a mish-mash retrospective, joining the past with the present, and not really part of the «vault-emptying drive» that began with Dylan and truly caught up with the majority of classic rockers at the turn of the millennium. Having successfully entered the game with Tracks, what Bruce really needed at this point was a bona fide recording of a com­plete, unaltered performance from the glory days — and hardly a better choice could have been made than this show from November 18, 1975, Bruce's first ever gig across the ocean in which he managed to conquer the somewhat skeptical British audiences in one two-hour long shot.

The recording, made available in both CD and DVD format, as some cameramen were fortunate enough to capture the young Boss in all of his bearded, hat-wearing, proto-indie-rock glory, has tremendous historical importance — although Born To Run was already climbing up the charts and critics were already outgushing each other, this is still Bruce Springsteen in his «pre-super­star» days, when all the now-classic material was still fresh and vibrant, and he got to perform ʽBorn To Runʼ not because, you know, what's a Boss show without ʽBorn To Runʼ? but simply because he'd only just written it and meant every word and every note of it. This is that particular era where the man had to work hard, and though nobody can accuse Bruce of not having worked hard enough even after the world was his for the taking, there are different kinds of hard out there, and this is one of these shows that actually caused people like Landau to go nuts, so...

In terms of surprises, there's not a lot of them, though people unfamiliar with the man's mid-Se­venties routine might find it amusing to hear Bruce insert so many strains of his various influen­ces into the songs: Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Van Morrison, Isaac Hayes, and even Gary U. S. Bonds are all channelled, either by themselves, or as threads interwoven into the man's own com­positions. Not that these bits are in any way the best parts of the show — as good as Bruce is at setting fire to his own songs, he is usually awful when covering other people, because he's really only got one mode of functioning (Boss mode!) and he always converts everything to that mode, no matter how much he might like and respect the originals. Was that really a piece of Sam Cooke's ʽHavin' A Partyʼ at the end of ʽThe E Street Shuffleʼ? Did he really lead ʽKitty's Backʼ into Van Morrison's ʽMoondanceʼ at one point? Oh, I'm sorry, I thought that was just some ran­dom small twist in the arrangement.

This is why the most easily skippable part of the album is the so-called ʽDetroit Medleyʼ, where Bruce mashes together some Shorty Long and Little Richard tunes with seemingly no other pur­pose than demonstrating his Rock And Roll Credentials, or else people might want to think of him as a jazz-pop artist or something. Not that the E Street Band couldn't carry a proper rock and roll tune — on the contrary, they just try way too hard, and yet it still feels that this isn't the kind of music that comes naturally to them. One catch is that Springsteen has always had a poor sense of humor, and for basic rock'n'roll humor is essential — he's singing ʽGood Golly Miss Mollyʼ as if he were pounding it with a wrecking ball or something, with his pay depending on how many small bits and splinters he could produce: energetic, powerful, and deadly serious. Okay, Cap'n, we got it, just stop it right there, please? The poor girl can't take any more of this.

For his own stuff, though, this approach is naturally the perfect one, and the performance is gene­rally stellar, with relatively little in the way of storytelling to prevent Bruce from setting up Fort New Jersey in what used to be Gaumont Palace. The songs are not too different from the studio counterparts, except for maybe ʽE Street Shuffleʼ, which is much countrified from its funky ori­gins and features an extended slide guitar solo that might remind you of the Allman Brothers, al­though the sprawling, messy nature of the tune on the whole shows more of a Van Morrison in­fluence (no wonder ʽMoondanceʼ is quoted, albeit inside another song); and the opening ʽThun­der Roadʼ which, as was typical for Bruce at the time, is performed in its stripped-down version, with keyboards and harmonica bearing the brunt of the melody.

But, of course, you don't need me or anyone else to tell you that this here stuff is all about youth­ful exuberance and total conviction, rather than about making the live audiences witness some­thing they could never encounter on the studio record. In terms of sheer intensity, these versions might really blow some of the originals out of the water — if you prefer the man's full-throttle roar to the inevitably slightly more subdued, controlled singing in the studio — and let us not forget that The E Street Band on stage takes pride in being even tighter and more focused than when contributing overdubs to studio tapes. Me not being the major Springsteen fan on the block, the originals are not that well ingrained in the brain to allow for astute nuance-spotting compa­risons with this show — but, heck, even I have to admit it was one hell of a show.

It probably makes more sense to just watch the video, though, which (at least in the original re­lease) came packaged together with the CDs (in fact, the video was released even earlier, on the 35th anniversary edition of Born To Run) — the image quality is not much to speak of, but at least it is professional, and it really is fun to see The Boss working hard to earn that title, rather than just keep on confirming it. The beard! The hat! No muscles! Little Stevie still years away from his Baba Yaga image! How could this not be a thumbs up?

Buddy Guy: This Is Buddy Guy!

BUDDY GUY: THIS IS BUDDY GUY! (1968)

1) I Got My Eyes On You; 2) The Things I Used To Do; 3) Fever; 4) Knock On Wood; 5) I Had A Dream Last Night; 6) 24 Hours Of The Day; 7) You Were Wrong; 8) I'm Not The Best.

Oh yes indeed, now this is Buddy Guy, with an exclamation mark, make no mistake about it. The man's first ever live album was recorded at the New Orleans House in Berkeley, California, and, true to the location, combines New Orleanian extravagance with the Californian sense of wild­ness and freedom. Vulnerable metaphors aside, this is simply a kick-ass performance that, for the very first time, gives us retro-listeners a taste of «Buddy unleashed» that was unthinkable on his Chess singles, and still very much subdued on his earliest studio recordings for Vanguard.

There is a problem, though. At the time, Buddy was clearly still on a major James Brown kick, and thought himself as much an R&B artist as a bluesman — which means that the selections are more or less equally divided between scorching blues / blues-rock performances and sweaty R&B rave-ups. And while the rave-ups are dutifully red-hot, and even Buddy's unknown brass section does a good job interacting with his ecstatic vocals, you just can't help the feeling that all of this is not playing to the man's greatest strengths. The best thing about them, really, is that they help to break up the monotonousness — one 12-bar blues tune after another can get tiresome even if the guitar work is always awesome — but while I heartily welcome the inclusion of ʽFeverʼ, which Buddy delivers with an almost comedic flair, ʽKnock On Woodʼ is mainly an excuse for pestering the audience about whether they feel all right, and the album-closing ʽI'm Not The Bestʼ is basically six minutes of "Good God!" screeching over a repetitive brass riff. Basically, there's too much of this wannabe-James-Brown posturing here to make me take this seriously.

The blues stuff, though — that is a different matter. From the opening licks of ʽI Got My Eyes On Youʼ, you understand that a new, daring, challenging presence on the blues scene has been made available: less wild and otherworldly than Hendrix, perhaps, and not as endowed with the gift of subtlety as B. B. King, but more fiery and eccentric than just about any other black gui­tarist alive at the time. It is not when he tries to imitate James Brown or Little Richard with his singing and showmanship that he is at his greatest — it is when he puts a little bit of James Brown or Little Richard into his guitar playing, giving the instrument a unique jerky, sputtering voice that ignites all sorts of passions when the man is really «on».

And here, he is totally on for all the duration of ʽI Got My Eyes On Youʼ, a militant mid-tempo boogie with gunfire soloing; for all of the slow-moving ʽI Had A Dream Last Nightʼ, whose scraggly, chaotic, stuttery guitar licks, sometimes building up to fabulous series of trills, are such a far cry from the carefully nuanced, economic, silky-soft sound of B. B. King; and for all of ʽYou Were Wrongʼ, with a slightly cleaner guitar tone that does not, however, in any way dimi­nish the rawness and roughness of delivery. This is the kind of sound that may, indeed, have cha­racterized his live playing for quite some time already — the kind of sound that inspired people like Clapton and Page, with whom we tend to associate it more than with Buddy, just because, well, Buddy Guy didn't get the chance to become a household name before the 1990s. But he was there all right, and This Is Buddy Guy! proves it.

And even if I'd only like to treasure one half of the album (honestly, I don't care at all if I never get to hear Buddy spit out "good God!" on the likes of ʽI'm Not The Bestʼ again in my life), that half is reason enough to award a thumbs up to the album in general. Of course, not every Buddy Guy live album is deserving a thumbs up by definition (in fact, some disgruntled fans state that no Buddy Guy live album so far has managed to truly capture the exuberance of his performance in all its glory), but here's to first-coming and introducing a new distinctive voice that could hold its own against all the big ones in the business — no mean feat for 1968 and its new, Hendrix-dependent standards of quality.

A-Ha: Cast In Steel

A-HA: CAST IN STEEL (2015)

1) Cast In Steel; 2) Under The Makeup; 3) The Wake; 4) Forest Fire; 5) Objects In The Mirror; 6) Door Ajar; 7) Living At The End Of The World; 8) Mythomania; 9) She's Humming A Tune; 10) Shadow Endeavors; 11) Giving Up The Ghost; 12) Goodbye Thompson.

I honestly do not understand why they need to do this. Morten Harket has a perfectly fine solo career going on, and now this is what, the third A-Ha reunion in history? Fourth? Fifth? What do we do with Ending On A High Note, rename it to save face or pretend it never existed? «Final tour», my ass. If you're gonna go, go in style. Take an example from the frickin' Beatles.

Besides, the new album does little to quench the indignation, and so I would like to keep it short. Not only is this no Analogue (and God knows I've secretly always hoped for them to make one more Analogue), this isn't even a Minor Earth Major Sky. Instead, it is a completely by-the-book, song-by-song-predictable «A-Ha-ish» album: fragile, bittersweet romance non-stop, with each song setting exactly the same mood as the previous one and we all know very well what that mood is. A dozen updates on ʽSummer Moved Onʼ, without even one single song of the same epic caliber. Rumor has it that many of these were actually outtakes and quick polish jobs on old ideas, and I believe this — just a quickie to serve as an incentive for more touring.

Supportive fans will want to argue that this is what the band does best, or point out the awesome shape in which Harket's voice still finds itself, or at least state that, you know, this is an improve­ment on Foot Of The Mountain. And yes, the songs are a little less embarrassing. But at least Foot set up a curious goal — recapture the inspired innocence of the band's early synth-pop be­ginnings — and it was instructive to see it fail. Cast In Steel sets itself no goals: it is just a bunch of tolerable, unimpressive, unambitious adult contemporary pop songs that all sound the same. I mean, believe it or not, the exceptional status of A-Ha was due to their not being a one-trick pony: over that ʽSummer Moved Onʼ vibe, they could always drop a touch of hard rock, or a splosh of colorful psychedelia, or a rousing anthemic call. Nothing like that here.

Of course, there are melodies, and sometimes briefly memorable vocal hooks, and yes, Harket is still a fine singer, though, creepy as it is, he seems to have almost completely lost (or discarded) his lower range as he grew older. Long-time fans who just want to have more of the same will not be disappointed. Me, I can't even bring myself to writing a few words about even one single indi­vidual song on here. Just keep touring, guys, as long as you're still able to wring some emotion out of the old classics — the new ones are as thumbs down-worthy as they come.