1) Mean Woman Blues;
2) (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear; 3) Loving You; 4) Got A Lot Oʼ Livinʼ To Do!;
5) Lonesome Cowboy; 6) Hot Dog; 7) Party; 8) Blueberry Hill; 9) True Love; 10)
Donʼt Leave Me Now; 11) Have I Told You Lately That I Love You; 12) I Need You
So; 13*) Tell Me Why; 14*) Is It So Strange*; 15) One Night Of Sin*; 16) When
It Rains, It Really Pours*.
General verdict: A little too much silly joyous doggy woof
and a bit too little angry doggy bark, but at least the basic ingredients of
the classic Elvis sound are still intact.
Elvisʼ soundtracks typically tend to be
segregated into a separate section in his discographies, either because there
were so many of them or because, due to the — putting it mildly — dubious
artistic nature of most of his movie, they would inevitably bear this stigma
and had to suffer being categorized as «inessential» listening. In reality, of
course, there was never any systematic, intrinsic discrepancy in quality
between the manʼs proper LPs and his soundtracks; nor does it make sense to
complain about any lack of coherence on these soundtracks — like any other
Elvis LP, they just give you the usual mix of softer / harder rockers and
ballads which will be tenderly appreciated by any supporter of the «more Elvis
is better Elvis» ideology. The respective quality of the music and the movies,
so it seems, rarely correlated with each other anyway — on one hand, I wouldnʼt
say that the soundtrack to King Creole,
inarguably Elvisʼ best movie, was necessarily superior to everything else he
recorded in the late Fifties; on the other, the quality of the music is
occasionally the only thing that redeems some of his weakest Sixtiesʼ films.
In any case, it makes little sense to discuss
any specific connections between the plot of Elvisʼ first movie and the music
on this LP (only half of which comes from the movie anyway). What does make
sense is to notice that the ratio of hard rock vs. everything else keeps
decreasing: the only properly angry rocker in sight is the very first song,
ʽMean Woman Bluesʼ, for which we should specifically thank the wonderful R&B
writer Claude Demetrius, who earlier used to make a living penning hilarious
ditties for the likes of Louis Jordan, and later would get Elvis another
first-rate ferocious hit in ʽHard Headed Womanʼ (judging by the lyrics,
Demetrius must have had a really tough time with his women even for the average
standards of a popular songwriter). In terms of melody or atmosphere, it adds
little to Elvisʼ recorded legacy of 1956, but it does give you another
excellent example of how focused and, well, mean
his little combo could be (though, if you ask me, the definitive version of the
song is to be found on Jerry Lee Lewisʼ Live
At The Star Club album, where his patented loud-to-quiet-back-to-loud trick
blows the roof off the house — Elvis never toys with your senses in such an
openly provocative manner).
The only other song here that tries to capture
a similar type of energy is ʽGot A Lot Oʼ Livinʼ To Doʼ, but its particular
energy is not an energy of anger — true to the songʼs title, it is the energy
of some boundless joie de vivre, with
Scottyʼs guitar licks in sexy playful mode and Elvisʼ vocals in sped-up
sentimental pop mode; it is simply a bombastic and revved-up rhythm section
that distinguishes the song from the likes of ʽTeddy Bearʼ. This is not a
reprieve, though — the wild style arrangement gives this happy youthful anthem
a whiff of rebelliousness all the same, and a properly happy Elvis can be just
as infectious and hypnotizing as a properly sexually provocative or a
chillingly morose Elvis. It is certainly more memorable than Jessie Mae
Robinsonʼs ʽ(Letʼs Have A) Partyʼ, a generic blues-rock number taken at a
disappointingly slow tempo — Wanda Jackson would do a much better job by
speeding it up and singing the melody in her knife-sharp rasp as if to insinuate
what sort of party this would really
be; but for Elvis, this particular delivery is more of a throwaway than
something to remember.
Still, once again, there are no true total duds
on the album. If something is almost unbearably cutesy and cuddly, it is at
least impossibly catchy (ʽTeddy Bearʼ); if a balladʼs tenderness is undermined
by a lack of hooks, it can still be redeemed by an occasional odd key change on
the piano and a weird vocal flow where you get confused as to when one verse
ends and the other one begins (title track); if a track bears the suspicious
title of ʽLonesome Cowboyʼ, it is at least given an oddly minimalistic, almost
somber musical sheen that is reminiscent of the early days at Sun, but also
improved by an eerie arrangement of the backing harmonies. Even the cover of
Fats Dominoʼs ʽBlueberry Hillʼ injects a subtle bit of vocal melancholy that
was only implied, not directly delivered, in Fatsʼ original — making this case
another potential playground for the never ending «whatʼs better, the black
original or the whitebread cover» debate.
Towards the end, the record does begin to drift
off into fairly conventional territory, with second-rate doo-wop numbers and
even a recent Cole Porter cover (ʽTrue Loveʼ) whose inclusion must have been
fairly detestable for hardcore Elvis fans back in those days. But as long as
the band sticks to its minimalistic arrangements, with just the core
instrumental quartet and barbershop backing harmonies for extra atmosphere, the
results are always tolerable. Unfortunately, already at this stage we
occasionally face silly acts of self-censorship — the bonus tracks include
Elvisʼ original cover of Dave Bartholomewʼs ʽOne Night (Of Sin)ʼ, with lyrics
that were considered so «gross» by the executives ("one night of sin is
what Iʼm now paying for") that the song would have to be lyrically
re-written and delayed until 1958. As it stands, its fat, bombastic arrangement
could have made a very nice and convincing companion to the lighter, thinner
New Orleanian sound of ʽBlueberry Hillʼ — but at least thank God for the
existence of bonus tracks.
1) Rip It Up; 2)
Love Me; 3) When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again; 4) Long Tall Sally; 5) First
In Line; 6) Paralyzed; 7) So Glad Youʼre Mine; 8) Old Shep; 9) Ready Teddy; 10) Anyplace Is Paradise; 11) Howʼs The
World Treating You; 12) How Do You Think I Feel; 13*) Hound
Dog; 14*) Donʼt Be Cruel; 15*) Any Way
You Want Me*; 16*) Too Much; 17*) Playing For
Keeps; 18*) Love Me Tender.
General verdict: A bit diluted with generic country and
doo-wop, but still proudly carrying rock'n'roll flame to a new generation.
All of Elvisʼ second album, hard and soft stuff
alike, pales in comparison with ʽHound Dogʼ, one of the hardest-hitting
rockʼnʼroll numbers of its era and possibly the closest Elvis ever came to
capturing that classic punk spirit — a short, tight, uncompromising, fully
focused assault on the senses, a musical shotgun blast that sends you off
flying in pieces. Of course, itʼs not just about Elvis: itʼs about Elvis and his entire backing band,
particularly D. J. Fontanaʼs drumming, as loud and aggressive and precise as
possible, with each fill between the verses cracking off in solid machine-gun
style, and Scotty Mooreʼs guitar, which he not so much plays as spanks in
full-on BDSM mode, culminating in the second solo which one can regard as a
spiritual predecessor to all the garage-rock excesses of the mid-Sixties.
It is precisely this collective punch which
makes casual accusations such as «oh, another case of white boy stealing black
peopleʼs music» so ridiculous — never mind the fact that ʽHound Dogʼ was
actually written for Big Mama Thornton by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, two kids
as Jewish-American as they come, but Elvis and his pals learned the song from
Freddie Bell & The Bellboys without knowing anything about Big Mamaʼs
slower, bluesier version in the first place. And even if they did, no other
band at the time, black or white, would dare to put such a ferocious spin on
the melody: I dare say that the intensity of ʽHound Dogʼ in mid-ʼ56 produced an
impact well comparable with, say, the first appearances of hardcore punk around
1979. It is one of the few Elvis songs that instills that kind of reaction in me even today, whenever I put it on — most
rockabilly classics from the Fifties inevitably sound tamer and cutesier to
experienced ears, but not this one. Each time Scotty hits those power chords at
1:22 into the song, it makes me feel like a frickinʼ teenager, no matter how
much time has elapsed.
It is somewhat strange that on this LP, most of
which was recorded just a couple months after ʽHound Dogʼ, we do not find even
a single attempt to properly recapture the same spirit. The closest they come
is with a cover of Little Richardʼs ʽLong Tall Sallyʼ, but thereʼs a good
reason why ʽHound Dogʼ remains a classic while hardly anybody remembers this
inferior version — for one thing, the production is disappointingly muddy next
to the sharp-as-a-knife sound of ʽHound Dogʼ, for another, the band plays in a
fairly perfunctory manner, with Scotty in more of a playful jazzy mood than
pissed-off punk, and, finally, Elvisʼ own delivery has a faint whiff of
uncertainty about it, as if he were still pondering over what those lyrics
really mean and how he should be approaching them as the tapes began rolling (a
mistake that would not be repeated
eight years later by Paul McCartney, who did not shy away from giving the song
all the attention that it required and came out with a relative winner). This
track really does sound a bit like
white men trying to steal a black manʼs thunder, and not doing a very good job
of it.
In general, as an LP, Elvis takes a predictable step back from the standards of Elvis Presley, though certainly not a
big one — on the whole, production values, playing enthusiasm, and cover
material remain strong, though the balance is slowly becoming to shift in favor
of sentimental ballads and «soft rock». «Hard rock» is basically limited to
three numbers, all of them Little Richard covers — and at the very least, Elvis
does a much finer job with ʽReady Teddyʼ and ʽRip It Upʼ than he does with
ʽLong Tall Sallyʼ, possibly because those two contain fewer sexual innuendos
and are generally party tunes about having a wild time at the local joint, an
activity certainly closer to Elvisʼ heart than the tabooed sexual practices of
ʽSallyʼ. ʽReady Teddyʼ, in particular, brings Mooreʼs and Fontanaʼs energy
levels almost back to the same
heights as we heard them on ʽHound Dogʼ, though the production is still a
little too muddied.
On the other end of the spectrum, however, we
see the country boy returning to his whitebread roots with songs like ʽOld
Shepʼ, a 4-minute Red Foley ballad whose intention it is to show us that,
actually, there are hound dogs around that Elvis does care about. Like many, many, many other Elvis ballads, your
reaction to it will largely depend on how convincing and hypnotizing you find
the manʼs traditional crooning style; I must issue a warning in advance that if
the accompanying melody or musical atmosphere isnʼt convincing enough, I am not
easily swayed by Elvisʼ voice as the sole benefit — and with the corny, soapy
lyrics of the song sinking it deep in the ground, ʽOld Shepʼ is certainly not the kind of material Iʼd ever like
to play at the funeral of my own pet. But with the songʼs length and
self-importance, this was clearly a sign — a sign that Mr. Presley was going to
be just as respectful of the old folk tradition as he would be of the new
rockʼnʼroll standards, and that he would be marketable to all segments of the audience.
In between those extremes there is a whole
bunch of bouncier ballads and soft pop-rock nuggets of varying quality, few of
them remembered all too well because there are much better examples of the same
style: thus, ʽParalyzedʼ utilizes the same boppy chords as both ʽTeddy Bearʼ
and ʽDonʼt Be Cruelʼ without being nearly as catchy as either, and the old Crudup
blues ʽSo Glad Youʼre Mineʼ would later get a more melodic and energetic
update, becoming ʽAinʼt That Loving You Babyʼ. Even Aaron Schroeder, who would
later contribute several of the catchiest songs of Elvisʼ entire career, this
time gives him a doo-wop toss-off (ʽFirst In Lineʼ, a song that nobody probably
remembers unless you happened to dance to it during prom night, which, as of
2020, is somewhat chronologically unlikely).
But at least almost nothing here — with the
possible exception of ʽOld Shepʼ — is particularly embarrassing; and if you
take the album together with its surrounding singles, most of them available as
bonus tracks, the collective weight of the classics (which would also include
ʽDonʼt Be Cruelʼ and ʽToo Muchʼ) certainly outshines the lack of gloss on the
average material. In any case, while Elvis
does give us a few signs that maybe
this Memphis kid isnʼt quite as rebelliously punkish as weʼd like him to remain
in our hearts, it certainly gives no signs that the fire and passion on his
earlier material was just a fluke. Simply put, the «Elvis Machine» hadnʼt yet
been put in motion by the end of ʼ56, and there was still plenty of room for
maneuvering, trying out different approaches, and generally fooling around.
Perhaps, most importantly, Elvis was not yet completely sucked into the
movie-making business — his first movie, Love
Me Tender, was shot around the same time as the album was recorded, but he
still only had a relatively small side part in it, and nobody could predict his
big future on the silver screen.
1) Blue Suede Shoes;
2) Iʼm Counting On You; 3) I Got A Woman; 4) One Sided Love Affair; 5) I Love You Because; 6) Just
Because; 7) Tutti Frutti; 8) Tryinʼ To Get To
You; 9) Iʼm Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry (Over You); 10) Iʼll Never Let You Go
(Little Darlinʼ); 11) Blue Moon; 12) Money
Honey; 13*) Heartbreak Hotel; 14*) I Was The
One; 15*) Lawdy Miss Clawdy; 16*) Shake, Rattle And
Roll; 17*) My Baby Left Me; 18*) I Want
You, I Need You, I Love You.
General verdict: This ainʼt just Elvis, really — this might be
one of the most consistent non-compilation LPs of the entire rockabilly era.
If you want to do this chronology stuff 100%
correctly, you should, of course, start with The Sun Sessions, a classic compilation that put together
everything that Elvis recorded for his first label, but was not released until
1976 (as an unintentionally vicious last minute reminder for the failing King
of what it used to be in the good old glory days) — or, better still, with the
first disc of The Complete 1950s Masters,
which simply arranges everything he did in rigorous chronological order and
dispenses with the necessity of putting all the scrambled pieces of the puzzle
together from his chaotic history of single / EP / LP releases. We shall,
however, opt for this fairly messy path instead and proceed from the string of
LPs, most of which still remain in print and, together with some accompanying
singles as bonus tracks, still paint a fairly authentic picture of the way in
which Elvisʼ original fans were learning of their idolʼs everyday routine.
Besides, if we just skip the LPʼs, we shall
have no pretext to mention the iconic album cover of Elvisʼ self-titled debut —
the same one, of course, that would later be symbolically imitated by The Clash
for London Calling. The difference
being that neither Elvis himself nor his overseers at RCA Victor probably
attributed any revolutionary significance to the image, and yet there is hardly
any question about whether the actual music here turned the musical world
upside down or not, whereas with London
Calling this would be fairly debatable. Even so, it is worth noticing that,
for a long long while, this was the only
Elvis LP to feature a typeface-covered hint at Elvisʼ golden hips, or actually
capture him in a moment of ecstatic performance — on everything that followed,
his posturing, facial expressions, and camera angles would hardly distinguish
him from your average teen idol. Fortunately, enough damage would already be
done with this photo so as not to let
anybody worry about the inoffensiveness of any subsequent ones.
Another special feature of Elvis Presley is that it actually happens to mix material from his
newer sessions for RCA with leftovers from Sun — with the market clearly
demanding an Elvis Presley LP, it was discovered that there simply wasnʼt
enough new material, so five out of twelve songs had to come from Sam Phillipsʼ
stock. Most of those are ballads, with the exception of ʽJust Becauseʼ, but
this is a good thing, because the minimalistic arrangements from the Sun
Studios, focusing almost exclusively on Elvisʼ vocals, made the songs stand out
from the generic doo-wop product of the day — when you listen to something like
ʽIʼm Counting On Youʼ, you might seriously wonder about why you should be
bothering with this stuff at all when you have The Platters or The Drifters,
but that weirdly wobbly version of ʽBlue Moonʼ, all echo and popping bass and
silence all around, actually makes it feel as if the singer is calling out to
the girl in the tower while trying to cross a deep moat late at night.
This mix of Elvisʼ original Sun style — the
lean, raw «power trio» synthesis of country-western and jump blues — and the
early RCA style, in which the rawness was partially sacrificed in favor of
updated production values and a bigger band, with actual drums and pianos, is
delightful in that it shows the creative evolution and expansion of a great
sound that has not yet begun to devolve into cuddliness and sentimentalism. Not
all the 12 songs on the original LP are equally great, but not a single one is cringeworthy,
a feat that would not be repeated on any subsequent record — and all this
considering that Presleyʼs best material at the time was not even supposed to
go on an LP in the first place.
From the very start, the «rockier» material
that he did for RCA fell into two categories — «hard rock», usually inspired by
or directly covering such masters of gritty R&B as Ray Charles and Little
Richard, and «soft rock», typically driven by piano boogie lines and owing more
to the tradition of saloon entertainment: your basic ʽShake, Rattle & Rollʼ
vs. your typical ʽTeddy Bearʼ opposition. Naturally, the rebel in me will
always fall for the first category before everything else, and these covers of
ʽI Got A Womanʼ and ʽTutti Fruttiʼ will always remain the definitive ones. Of
course, Elvis and his band whip the tunes into tight-focused action like the
pistol-packinʼ white cowboys they are, rather than let them hang a little loose
and sloppy and irreverent like their original black creators — which is a good
thing, because each of these songs now got two lives instead of one. When I
hear Little Richard go blop-bam-boom, my mind visualizes a crowded, tightly
packed, smoky, sweaty ballroom; with Elvis, the song becomes a frenzied cowboy
charge through the prairie — reach Point A from Point B in two minutes flat,
lasso the bull, mission accomplished. (By the way, the absolutely insane
instrumental break in the middle of ʽTutti Fruttiʼ might just be the single
punkiest explosion of noise captured in the rockabilly era — what the heck are
those drums even doing?).
Happily, though, the «soft rock» tunes this
time around are also a lot of goofy fun: ʽOne-Sided Love Affairʼ features a
beautiful rollickinʼ barrelhouse piano part from Floyd Cramer on top of a vocal
that sounds like its owner has just run a marathon but still has to get it all
out as if his life depended on it, and ʽIʼm Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry Over
Youʼ is another successful stab at turning generic country blues into
rockabilly — and for now, it looks as though adding piano and drums to the mix
might have been a definitive win over
the sparseness of the Sun sound... well, hardly anybody in early ʼ56 could have
guessed about the way things would ultimately turn out.
Now, the big question: was the difference
between an Elvis LP and an Elvis hit single at the time really that crucial? Answer: by no means. Sure,
ʽHeartbreak Hotelʼ is only here as a bonus track, and few things in 1956 could
beat the stunning effect of ʽHeartbreak Hotelʼ. But all these other 14 tracks —
yes, some are weaker than others, but there is no true filler here, because (a)
Elvis had great taste in covers, whenever he got to choose them for himself and
(b) RCA had the wisdom, at the time, to hook him up with some really talented
songwriters who could hammer out distinct, interesting personalities for their
songs. And if ʽHeartbreak Hotelʼ may be a one-of-a-kind knockout track indeed
(is there one single tune in the universe that actually sounds even remotely
like it?), its follow-up single, ʽI Want You, I Need You, I Love Youʼ, is
actually a fairly straightforward prom night slow dance track that is far less
exciting than most of the LP tracks.
My point being here that it would be deeply
incorrect to regard pre-army Elvis as specifically a «singles artist» because
all pop artists were «single» at the time. The high quality of his LPs was not
necessarily a good sign: what it really meant was that the commercial machine
had almost immediately latched on to him as its major cash cow, and was ready
to spin its wheels overtime to ensure high quality product (normally, not a lot
of people bought LPs, but with Elvis, sales were guaranteed all the way). But
for a while, as long as the industry was still young and as long as Colonel
Parker could be able to stimulate the interest of people who could get excited
about something other than just
money, it worked, and it gave the world approximately two great years during
which Elvis Presley would be the most prolific and the most consistent of all the young white entertainers in the
rockʼnʼroll business.
1) Guitar Craft Theme I: Invocation; 2) Tight
Muscle Party At Love Beach; 3) The Chords That Bind; 4) Guitar Craft Theme III:
Eye Of The Needle; 5) All Or Nothing II; 6) Guitar Craft Theme II: Aspiration;
7) All Or Nothing I; 8) Circulation; 9) A Fearful Symmetry; 10) The New World;
11) Crafty March.
General verdict: King Crimson Spin-Off Episode II: ʽAttack Of
The Acoustic Clonesʼ.
More accurately, Robert Fripp And The League Of Crafty Guitarists; one might even
reasonably doubt about how necessary it is to include the discussion of such a
record in King Crimsonʼs discography, since it is ultimately unclear how much
of that crafty guitar is even played by Fripp here in the first place. The
album was the first in an occasionally renewed series of releases by Robert and
his alumni from Frippʼs school of Guitar Craft, which he had founded in 1985 —
now that he had his hands completely free from King Crimson again — and which
has since claimed to have released more than three thousand graduates, though,
perhaps not surprisingly, the only more or less familiar names belong to those
graduates who actually went on to play in new incarnations of King Crimson
themselves (like Trey Gunn).
Next to Fripp, the credits list the names of
about twenty different musicians, each of them labeled «acoustic guitar,
composer», to stress that creativity was just as important for crafty
guitarists as technicality. If I am correct, however, none of them are aligned
with individual tracks, though, clearly, not all of these twenty people play on
all the tracks together at the same time — to stress that, in the end, the
music matters more than the performerʼs identity. This is the perfect excuse to
include the album in the discography, because even if it turns out that Robert
himself does not play a single note here, Live!
is still distinctly Crimsonian in spirit. It is also surprisingly good: certainly
not an unexpected overlooked masterpiece or anything, but far more satisfactory than what youʼd normally expect from the
musical equivalent of a collection of graduation essays from promising, but
not-genius students.
The albumʼs special quality is, of course, that
most of it is acoustic, which sort of makes it the kind of record that could satisfy
our curiosity if we all started wondering about how Discipline would have sounded without amplification and sound
effects. The tracks shuffle between familiar speedy polyrhythmic exercises and
slower, moodier, more meditative and ambient paintings in a way that is
surprisingly listener-friendly: it is almost as if Fripp intended the album to
fulfill more of an advertising function for his musical philosophy and methods of
teaching than to simply be another obscurity-headed gift for the devoted fans. (Of
course, it still ended up an obscurity-headed gift for the devoted fans, but
hope dies last). As a result, this is a small, compact, and perfectly
listenable — provided you already have a feel for New Wave-era King Crimson, of
course — encyclopaedia of Frippisms which anybody with just an acoustic guitar
and plenty of time to kill is welcome to.
It is even not devoid of hooks: ʽAll Or Nothingʼ,
for instance, has such a strong, catchy basic theme, presented as a sort of Tom-and-Jerry
dialog between treble and bass, that Fripp saw fit to include two versions of
it — after more than eight minutes of the composition, that theme refuses to
leave my head, but in a good way, like some psychedelic chase scene that
infuses you with energy despite all the repetition. And ʽEye Of The Needleʼ
adds a pinch of smooth tenderness to the familiar guitar cobwebs — give it a
suave Belew vocal overdub and you might have some strong competition for ʽThree
Of A Perfect Pairʼ. Other tracks may be helped out by the irony of their titles:
ʽTight Muscle Party At Love Beachʼ sounds precisely the way it announces
itself, but provided all the guests at the party in question are scurrying
little ants.
The slower parts are not nearly as interesting
and often do sound like well-executed exercises: ʽThe Chords That Bindʼ is a
minimalistic piece probably just intended to illustrate the relations between
several chords in a single complex progression, and the cohesive cycle joined
together by titles like ʽInvocationʼ, ʽAspirationʼ and ʽCirculationʼ is nice
enough background music for a special meditation session (somehow Frippʼs
manner of playing and composing always seems more idiosyncratic and off-beat to
me when he is going for a fast and aggressive sound than when he is slowing and
smoothing things down — Iʼm sure there is a perfectly valid musicological explanation
for this somewhere). Still, they are more odd and unique than ʽThe New Worldʼ,
a lengthy piece of Frippertronics that, for some reason, fleshes out the albumʼs
second side — perhaps it was discovered that all of Frippʼs horses and all of Frippʼs
men, no matter how well trained, still couldnʼt put 40 minutes of music
together again, and so we have these ten minutes that will not add anything new
to your understanding of Frippertronics.
At the end of the album, after a brief performance of ʽCrafty Marchʼ, which I assume to have had the status of a group anthem (all twenty guys playing in unison? is that what contributes to the odd quasi-harpsichord effect, or am I just hallucinating?), we are treated to a minute of collective applause — the only reminder, really, that the album was supposed to be titled Live!, and that Fripp actually prefers live playing with elements of improvisation to calculated studio craft, but that the audience at these live sessions need only be there as passive recipients, never as an even mildly active part of the experience itself. Which, of course, works perfectly fine for the kind of music that King Crimson play. I seriously doubt that these here pieces were recorded before any sort of live audience — live in the studio, most certainly, but the tacked-on applause just sounds like a bit of modernist irony, especially in the wake of yet another acclaimed version of King Crimson having just laid down their instruments and quit the stage for good.
I suppose that after my (provisional) selection of Purple Mountains as the album of the year, I should at least make amends by officially ending the year on a slightly more uplifting note. I have a very small selection of DVDs from which I usually choose something to watch on the last day of the year as "wholesome family entertainment", and most of these are fairly predictable, so here is a slightly less conventional choice - the classic video of Fleetwood Mac's reunion concert from 1997. (Ironically, it does feature at least one of the most depressing performances of all time, but on the whole, it's all about raising your spirits rather than smacking them in the face).
It is an absolute tragedy and travesty that there is not a single complete, full-length, high-quality video release of a classic FM show from their mid-Seventies-to-early-Eighties heyday: the closest we have is a criminally cut and poorly shot video from the Mirage tour in '82, which is still great in its own rights but does not even begin to approach capturing what the Mac were capable of back when they were arguably THE greatest "traditional pop-rock" live outfit on the planet. The Dance, however, despite all the band members having visibly aged and cut down on the insane levels of energy and wildness of their coke-soaked youth, manages to at least somewhat compensate for that - and even with all the limitations, it still has to count as one of the finest concert movies of all time (now just imagine if they'd shoot it in 1979 rather than 1997!).
Changing our chronological perspective and comparing the show with tons of footage that we have from Fleetwood Mac's reunion tours in the 21st century, we can clearly see the difference: on The Dance, we see a somewhat nervous, on-its-guard band which has a clear task - prove to the world that they are so much more than just a nostalgic act - and to do that, they have to slightly amend their arrangements and their posturing to give the old classics a more polished, more thoughtful, more controlled feel. This is particularly obvious in the stage presences of Nicks and Buckingham. Stevie here is notably more calm and rational than usual, with 'Rhiannon' becoming more of a meditative piece than an act of exorcism which it used to be in the old days. As for Lindsey, each note that he plays here sounds meticulously rehearsed and pre-planned - he is taking no unpredictable risks whatsoever - but this is still seriously brilliant meticulousness, as he delivers arguably the best pre-constructed (as opposed to fully improvised) guitar build-ups for 'I'm So Afraid' and 'Go Your Own Way' of his career. And, of course, you get to fully appreciate his inimitable acoustic technique on a new arrangement of 'Big Love' that completely lays to waste the old synth-pop original from Tango In The Night (I know all you synth-pop lovers will probably disagree, but nothing brings out the aching soul in that song like a great acoustic guitar arrangement).
What marred such later Mac tours as the one captured on 2004's Live In Boston was that the success of The Dance helped them realize that they could pass off as crowd-pleasing superstars, and bring back some of the show-off-ey goofiness that they should really have left for good back in the Eighties. What I admire so much about The Dance is precisely its amount of restraint and maturity: the band lets the intrinsic quality of its pop material largely speak for itself, fully concentrating on the music rather than their stage presence and audience teasing. In all honesty, this is probably where Fleetwood Mac should have ended - one perfect last mature goodbye to their greatness (though I will be the first to admit that Say You Will had its share of excellent songwriting). Regardless, the filmed experience is here with us to stay, and we can always pretend for it to have been the swan song, especially if this helps us block out the ridiculous memories about the latest self-parodic Fleetwood Mac scandals (Lindsey "Twice Fired" Buckingham, etc.).
The obvious individual choices to post here would be either 'I'm So Afraid' or 'Go Your Own Way', but I don't want to overdo the gloomy depressing game in the first case and don't want to be way too predictable in the second, so here's 'Gypsy' instead - Stevie is sweet and gorgeous, and Lindsey's pitch has an exquisite golden ring to it here that sounds more clean and pure than on the studio version and on any other live one. Such an angelic experience.
Album of the week (of the year?), Dec. 27: Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains
I am ashamed to admit that up until about ten
days ago, I had no idea who David Berman was, had never heard a single song by
the Silver Jews, and suspected that this one-album project «Purple Mountains», which
for some bizarre reason kept cropping up on year-end lists all around, would
probably be a collaboration between another boring bunch of bearded
neo-folkies, nice for a couple listens and then gone for good (see Avett Brothers,
Band Of Horses, etc. — the list is actually endless, because for every generic urban
teen-pop sensation these days you have to have yourself a generic rural revival
band). I could partially be excused for this, of course, since Berman had very
consistently kept a low profile from the very beginning of his career, and the
only way I could have learned about it would for me to become a very big fan of
Pavement, which I never did become.
Maybe it was all for the better, though, because these days I am so
short on pleasant surprises that to receive the biggest surprise of the year
right now made this Christmas a
little bit more endurable than it has been for me over the past two or three years.
Thirty seconds into the first song I was all "oh no, not another modern
country-rock singer-songwriter with nothing to say, and playing something that
sounds like Weenʼs ʽPiss Up A Ropeʼ at 30% the energy and 10% the humor,
too". Two tracks into the album, I was feeling a spiritual connection
stronger than with any other 2019 record Iʼd heard. Halfway into the album, I
was feeling as if Iʼd just made myself a new friend. By the end of the album, I
was literally tearing up — and it was only by the end of the album, mind you,
that I actually began looking for more information on Purple Mountains and the
man behind it.
If, like me ten days ago, you happen to be in the dark about David
Berman as well, let me just state a few brief facts about the music. This is a
collection of ten simple, unpretentious, unassuming tracks that should
generally be characterized as «country-rock» or «roots rock» or whatever and
offer no particularly new or challenging musical ideas whatsoever. Most of them
are moderately catchy in the same way that any traditionally-oriented country
tune may be catchy — in the sense that youʼve probably heard it before. The
arrangements, constructed by Bermanʼs small backing band, are just diverse
enough so that the songs do not completely blend into each other: a touch of
swampy harmonica here, a swoop of pseudo-Mellotron there, a sweet little slide
guitar solo here, a bit of quasi-Latin brass instrumentation there. The singing
is competent, but from a technical point there is absolutely nothing to write
home about. Based on all this evidence, this is an album that I should, by all
accounts, have hated or at least forgotten about the very minute it breathed
its last breath — and so should everybody else. Instead, it became the freshest
breath of musical air I remember breathing in in... well, quite some time.
Back in the old days, when I tried to carve out a crude, but workable
system of criteria according to which Iʼd rate records and artists, arguably
the most elusive of those — but also arguably the most important of them all — was
the criterion of adequacy. Not to be
confused with the easily understandable sincerity,
it is more of a question about whether all the parts of the whole come together
in an organic and unforced manner. Is the style of singing adopted here
suitable for the chosen musical arrangements? Do the words pursue the same
goals as the melodies? Is the level of atmospheric ambitiousness and pomp
justified by the complexity of the music? It was the kind of intuitive, but
efficient test that, for instance, a progressive rock band like Genesis would
typically pass with flying colors, while a progressive rock band like Kansas
would flunk face down in the mud (leading to a lot of bewildered people asking
me, «how can you hate Kansas if you claim to love Genesis?» — too bad I never
had enough time to finish that Only Solitaireʼs Dummyʼs Guide to the Art of Adequacy).
This criterion of adequacy is something that gets broken down over and
over again, more and more often as we advance through the first decades of the
21st century. Chances are that if you are a modern artist — commercial, indie,
doesnʼt really matter — you have probably violated it many times without even
suspecting. Crappy pop artists who toss their simplistic shit up in the air at
Glastonburies and Coachellas, hoping that it will rain down on their audiences
like a modern day Beethovenʼs 9th — or
crappy indie loners like Justin Vernon or Phil Elverum who think that the
surest way to get into your hearts is to ostentatiously deliver you their own
on a plate, cut up into small-size chunks and delicately wrapped up with a
silver ribbon each. Above and beyond everything else, though, most of those
people are busy creating their own personae.
More often than not, I find myself shying away from a record because I get a
distinct feeling that its author is trying to be somebody else — and, again, it
does not matter if we are talking about some insecure 18-year old girl trying
to be the next modern day Madonna, or about a perfectly normal next-door
neighbor going on stage and trying to become the next modern day Robert Plant.
Thereʼs this damn distance between the real person and the artistic personality
that seems to become wider and wider with each passing year, and it certainly
doesnʼt help things much in the adequacy department.
This is why Purple Mountains, despite all of its simplicity, immediately
stood out for me — first and foremost, it is one of the most adequate, if not the most adequate, period, record of the
past few years, hell, maybe even the entire decade, that I had the luck to come
upon... ironically, in the very last weeks of that decade. It is nothing more
and nothing less than David Bermanʼs personal diary, subtly arranged in poetic
and musical form — and its aim is simply to make public that diary exactly the
way it is, without omitting any significant details and without embellishing
any single one of them. The music perfectly serves its purpose: it makes
absolutely no pretense at innovation or «specialness», but it ensures that the
diary, all of its thoughts and sentiments, reaches and influences your senses,
much like a pharmaceutical capsule ensures that the relevant powder reaches
your infected organs. Likewise, Bermanʼs singing voice is completely devoid of
any artificial tricks or modulations that give vocalists their unique characteristics,
but it has this little natural quiver to it, you know, the one that sounds so
endearing when the singer actually manages to hit the right notes — your ears
are guaranteed not to bleed, and at the same time you have the impression of
dealing with a fragile, vulnerable human being who just might need a friend in
yours truly... and you might need a friend in him, too.
The amazing thing about Purple
Mountains is that, although all of the songs consistently focus on a long
series of disillusionments, disappointments, personal tragedies and global
catastrophes, it is not a record
about the narcissistic art of self-pitying. As the very first song tells us,
ʽThatʼs Just The Way That I Feelʼ: Berman simply wants you to know that after a
fairly long period of searching for the meaning of life, he has realized that
life has no meaning, or, if it has one, he has no way of ever finding it out.
At the center of it all lies a somewhat predictable breakup story: several of
the songs explicitly deal with the end of his long and troubled relationship
with his wife — a relationship that may have been doomed from the start, as it
typically happens with a relationship between one person who loves life to a
certain extent and another person who hates life in most of its forms. But,
once again, Purple Mountains is not
your average «breakup album». When he sings about how ʽAll My Happiness Is
Goneʼ, it should be taken not only in the context of its immediate lyrics about
the "light of my life", but in the general context of the album as
well — which covers quite a few irritating factors. Most importantly, he does
not present this situation as a tragedy: more like an inevitability of life, something to be accepted and dealt with in
the same manner that we accept and deal with bad weather, or, say, news about some
gruesome airplane crash in a country (or galaxy) far, far away.
I have not even mentioned yet that the album features some of the best
lyrics I have come across in this century — I normally tend to avoid quoting
specific lines, just so nobody could suspect me of being over-wooed by the
words rather than the music, but, hell, much of this stuff is easily Dylan- or
Cohen-level shit, and also, yes, this
time around I will actually allow myself to be over-wooed by the words, just
because it is downright scary how often they click with my own feelings. Just
see here: "The life I live is sickening / I spent a decade playing chicken
with oblivion" (ʽThatʼs Just The Way That I Feelʼ — not to mention rhyming
"destroyed" with "schadenfreude", which should score extra
points on any board); "Lately, I tend to make strangers wherever I
go" (ʽAll My Happiness Is Goneʼ); "Got a comb over cut circa Abscam
sting / Make a better Larry than Lizard King" (ʽStoryline Feverʼ); the
oft-quoted hilariously bitter "If no oneʼs fond of fucking me / Maybe no
oneʼs fucking fond of me" (ʽMaybe Iʼm The Only One For Meʼ); and probably my favorite of all — the ambiguity of "Light of my
life is going out tonight / With someone she just met... Light of my life is
going out tonight / Without a flicker of regret"; if these lines arenʼt
Nobel-worthy, I donʼt know what fuckinʼ is).
Once again, though, even if the lyrics are inarguably the albumʼs
strongest individual selling point, Purple
Mountains is not an album about brilliant word-craft. Nor is it an album of
«Americana», though you could technically file it under that label for lack of
a better one. Nor is it an album driven by ego and personality — nor is it a
conservative retro-statement; at times, Bermanʼs deep crooning might bring on
faint associations with Johnny Cash or even Frank Sinatra in his Wee Small Hours phase (Frank would most
certainly have endorsed the slow-paced, humbly gorgeous ʽSnow Is Falling In
Manhattanʼ), and at other times, I even had faint thoughts of J. J. Cale, but
Berman is not a minstrel, not a minimalist, not a deconstructivist, not a... in
a way, it is easier to define Purple
Mountains by all the things that it is not,
rather than the one thing that it is, and this is a good thing, because the
result is an album that is at once fully conditioned by its personal, social,
and cultural context and at the same time completely and utterly independent of
it. All that matters is the honesty and adequacy, and the implications of the awful pain, not an embellished, amplified,
hyperbolized version of it; if we do wish to find the closest analogy in
Americana rootsiness, I think the best example would be Hank Williams, though
that was, of course, a very long time ago and followed completely different
standards.
Listening to the album just made me realize that, perhaps, here is the very
key to my being so disappointed with most of modern music — in its endless
quest for, on one hand, innovation and modernisation, on the other, imitation
and resurrection, most artists have simply forgotten that the artistʼs first,
if not only, task is to be able to express the artist himself / herself. They
all really want to be someone else: the
next Kate Bush, the next Springsteen, the next Mariah Carey, the next Britney
Spears, the next Pearl Jam, whatever. They donʼt draw their inspiration from
within themselves or even from what is happening around them — they draw it
from second-hand musical recipes, thinking that if, perhaps, they shuffle
enough ingredients between several of them, this
is what will make them them. How frickinʼ ironic, then, that it takes a goddamn
musical recluse like David Berman, who allegedly spent most of the last decade locked
in, to remind us all that true art comes from the heart, rather than cookbooks.
When it comes to individual examples, one link will certainly not
suffice for this masterpiece. Here is, arguably, the most intimately personal
song from the album:
— and here, for contrast, is the most directly «social» song from it, transparently
reflecting Davidʼs disappointment in humanity and religion while still preserving enough space for his little
phonetic games (note all the quirky internal rhymes in the bridge):
On an additional curious note, after discovering Purple Mountains, I had time to round up some highlights from
Silver Jewsʼ individual albums — and while they all predictably shared the same
Berman charisma and showed his excellent lyrical skills, nothing really hit as
hard as this album. Itʼs almost as if his entire life was really leading him up
to this moment: in one of the interviews accompanying the release of the album,
I saw him explaining to the reporter that he felt this might indeed be his best
work, despite how clichéd such a statement could feel coming from the mouth of
an old musician, what with all the old dinosaurs always boasting about their
«returns to form» etc. — except that he was 100% right about it.
SPOILER PART (Do not read this if
you have not yet heard the album and are not at all aware of the circumstances
around it — rather, go listen to it first and then come back here):
Believe it or not, it was not until I had finished listening to the
album and formed a clear understanding in my soul that it was something truly
special that I actually learned about the man behind it taking his own life
less than a month after the album came out. This was great news and this was terrifying
news. Great, because not even God himself could now come down and say that
"oh, you only really pretended to love this because the dude hanged
himself" — deep down in my soul, I know that Bermanʼs suicide is just as
irrelevant to the power exerted by these songs as, say, the killing of John
Lennon is irrelevant to enjoying Double
Fantasy as one of the greatest hymns to domestic bliss and tranquility.
Terrifying, because when you identify yourself so much with the moods, words,
and sentiments of a guy who spent most of his fourth decade in the pangs of
"motivational paralysis" (which I also suffer from more and more
these days) and finally took his own life at the start of his fifth... well,
you get my drift.
What is particularly sad is that Purple
Mountains are not at all suicidal in mood. Of course, on paper lines like
"Darkness and cold, darkness and cold / Rolled in through the holes in the
stories I told" and "All my happiness is gone / Itʼs all gone
somewhere beyond" might seem like quotes from a suicidal note, and in
retrospect, it seems as if they formally were; but even so, I do not believe
for one second that Berman actually thought of the album as his testament when
he was recording it. On the contrary, there is a stoic feel to these songs — an
acknowledgement that even if life seems to have absolutely no meaning at the
moment, and even if communication with the outside world has become one large
uninterrupted act of colossal failure, it may
somehow be in our interests to simply accept this as a given and adjust to the
grimness of the situation. This is, almost explicitly so, the lyrical message
of the closing song, ʽMaybe Iʼm The Only One For Meʼ, but the entire attitude
of the album is about that — rule of the day is «no self-pity, no overblown
morbidity» — and only now that the man is no longer with us, we can see how
hard it must have been for him to observe that rule, and how his brain actually
drove him to break it.
Some of this decadeʼs best albums have already been associated with
death (Bowieʼs Blackstar, Cohenʼs You Want It Darker), yet, for some
reason, Bermanʼs little oeuvre strikes me harder and harsher — not just because
he was so much younger and took his life himself, but also because both Bowie
and Cohen had long since built themselves their own cozy ivory towers,
definitely not shutting themselves out but privileged enough to look at this
degrading world of ours from a bit of a safe distance; Berman, for all his
reclusiveness and mental issues, always sounded like he was very much of this earth — probably one of the reasons
why his engagement with Judaism after heʼd dissolved the Silver Jews turned out
to be short-lived and only led to yet another disillusionment. Itʼs all about a
guy who would very much want to be friends with everybody, who would be happy
to see the world return to the light, but who has finally realized that the
entire system, from the political to the personal, has become too fucked up for
him to be able to solve this problem. And I donʼt know about you, but I
definitely sense quite a bit of David Berman inside myself. Heck, who am I
kidding? If you donʼt have a bit of
David Berman inside yourself, you must be Donald Trump or something.
[Since this review has definitely outgrown the "mini-" format, video of the week will come separately, a couple days later].
By the middle of the second track on this album, I made myself a mental note: "I shall not find even ONE negative review of this album from anybody who makes a living writing reviews". As the other tracks rolled by, I googled a couple dozen sources and found this opinion completely vindicated. I cannot exclude that if I spent a couple more hours, I would have found a dissenting opinion or two, but instead of wasting those two hours away, let me waste just ten minutes to provide this dissenting opinion on my own part.
First and foremost, let us take this record completely on its own terms, without knowing anything about its author, its lyrical subjects, its sociological context in 2019. The only context in which we are allowed to take it is the musical context - it would, at the very least, be disrespectful to the genres of Neoclassical, Industrial, Goth, Darkwave, etc., if we pretended that they never existed and that "Caligula" arose out of nowhere. The question then is: is "Caligula" outstanding enough in terms of all those traditions to merit being noted?
Unfortunately, I am not that well acquainted with all these musical styles to answer that question objectively. Subjectively, though, the musical backbone of "Caligula" largely seems to consist of boring minimalism - very, very long, ambient-ish pieces, usually milking the shit out of a small bundle of bass piano chords (for understandable reasons, she doesn't favor the right side of the keyboard too much) and toccata-and-fugue-ish organ runs. Any kind of development is generally confined to the vocalist's voice, which works in three different modes: (a) gravely whisper, (b) lithurgic chant, (c) banshee scream. Modes (a) and (b) are passable, but not particularly outstanding; mode (c) is pretty much the record's major selling point, because even in this world of liberated and empowered ladies, this kind of high-pitched, guttural, tear-your-lung-out screaming can be more shocking than, say, female growling vocals (which are no longer a rarity at all).
The problem is, this is precisely one type of gimmicky attitude, and it is reproduced ten times on ten tracks that often run close to 7-8 minutes, making for one hell of an exhausting listen. Almost like the DNA of a living cell, each of these songs on its own contains the entirety of Lingua Ignota's message: a combination of medieval / baroque church atmosphere + an artistic recreation of the spirit of "I Spit On Your Grave". That's fine enough for one song - why extend it to ten, if all they have to support them is atmosphere, rather than interesting melodies?
And this is, of course, precisely where all the extra-musical context comes in. It's 2019, it's the age of liberation, it's the age of protest against domestic abuse, and apparently that's what it is: Kristin Hayter's loud and proud symbolic artistic statement on the horrors experienced by women at the hands of their abusers. Brilliant move, for sure: dare to write that this album is MAYBE not very musically interesting, and MAYBE not exactly as shiver-inducing and terrifying as it insists it is, and what you're doing is you're disrespecting victims of abuse and protecting men's rights to beat up their girlfriends. Give "Caligula" anything less than an A- (the minus, of course, is only for being way too short) and you're probably a male chauvinist who deserves all the multiple curses set upon him by the protagonist.
Well, having already sacrificed my credibility so many times anyway, I'll go ahead and say: "Caligula" is a curious artefact if taken in a small dose - preferably just one track, any track will do. But in general, it is murderously overlong; its "classically trained" artist is a musical amateur who spends way more time on self-aggrandizing than on mastering her craft; and it takes itself more seriously in depicting horror and suffering than an Auschwitz survivor probably would. Adding insult to injury, Hayter has the nerve to adopt an artistic pseudonym based on the life and art of St. Hildegard von Binden, unquestionably one of the most unique female talents of the Medieval ages - whose penchant for all things weird and mystical was fully compatible with writing some of the most technically accomplished and challenging (AND beautiful) vocal melodies of her time, and whose art, for that matter, never ever focused on self-aggrandizing or self-pitying.
Consequently, my humble piece of advice: if you are unfamiliar with this phenomenon, go listen to one track - like I said, any one will do, I'm just providing the link to the one tune that has all the ingredients in their right places - and then rather take some time to listen to Hildegard instead. (The early music ensemble Sequentia specializes on her works, and though they, too, are all atmospherically similar, each simple antiphon has more dynamics in it than all of "Caligula").
Video of the week: Peter Gabriel - Live In Athens 1987
Since I don't have any DVDs of Goth-type women playing Satan's brides (I do so wish at least a single complete Nico concert would become available one day, but it's probably not going to happen), let's go for something completely different and promote this wonderful live show from a still relatively young Peter Gabriel instead. This was filmed soon after the commercial success of So, so that he probably finally had a large enough budget to afford a proper filming crew - and here we see him still in top form, with great prancing energy, a head full of hair, and a superstar confidence that has not managed to erase the cute shyness and modesty of his early days.
There is a price to pay, for sure: this being the mid-1980s, you're gonna have to tolerate the hairstyles, the trench coats, the portable keyboards, and whatever other trappings have not survived the era for good reasons. But once you get past that and just concentrate on the awesome music, the unbridled enthusiasm, and the always amazing Tony Levin on bass, pretty soon you won't be noticing the side effects - more likely, you'll just be saying to yourself, "oh God, how young and dashing that guy actually used to be!"
But I probably wouldn't be recommending this show so heavily if it wasn't for one particular performance that cut straight to the heart - the hypnotic 9-minute rendition of 'Mercy Street', a song I didn't even remember all that well in its studio version, here expanded to the status of a heartbreaking Christian prayer for the ages. If it's rock theater (and, in a way, everything that PG does has always been rock theater), then it's a prime example of how to work that "suspension of disbelief" thing and make the viewer reach catharsis and purification through art, something that all the Lingua Ignotas of 2019 will probably never learn to do.
I really really like Angel Olsen. I think she's smart, she's "intelligently beautiful" in the most respectful way possible, she's got great taste, she's got some useful lyrical insights, and she has now mastered the art of Phil Spector echo arguably better than any other female singer-songwriter in 2019 (is that a compliment? please tell me it's a compliment). I can even forgive her that on a few of these tracks, as long as they still do not get their bombastic pop groove up and going, her icy nasal vocal twang may occasionally sound like Lana Del Rey's Siamese twin. Because Lana Del Rey just isn't capable of such friendly Ray Davies-inspired piano pop as 'Spring', for one thing.
What I cannot forgive - well, I CAN forgive, but I certainly cannot forgo - is that All Mirrors is basically just My Woman Vol. 2, and it seems that Olsen is now stuck for good with that particular formula: she has completed her journey from acoustic balladeer to symph-pop operator, and now seems fully content about having found herself, exploring herself under a magnifying glass from a variety of angles and always coming out with the same result. I gave the record a couple of spins, it all sounded good... and each song escaped from memory the second it was over. Nothing new for me, of course, but damn it kinda hurts every single time when it happens with an artist towards whom you feel so warmly pre-disposed at the outset.
At times, it becomes unbearably frustrating: she has these technically gorgeous string arrangements scattered all over the place, for instance, but she can't find a single truly breathtaking swoop - come on, it's not THAT difficult, girl, Jeff Lynne was picking them all over the floor back in the Seventies. Nope. These melodic moves just don't move me ('What It Is' is a good example - she tries all sorts of weird orchestral tricks throughout its martial progression, but they never hit a nerve). In the end, it always comes back to the same old same old: yet another nice artist so totally in awe of and dependent on her influences that they never allow her to prove that she is really SHE and not a synthetic homage to somebody else. As usual, a tip of the hat for the effort, but one more record that won't be staying with me for long.
Here, take a listen to this and tell me if I'm a fool for thinking that this song gets stuck somewhere in mid-air in its desperate leap for beauty:
Video of the week: Jeff Lynne's ELO - Live In Hyde Park (2014)
Since I mentioned ELO anyway, why not put in a bit of promotion for this concert from 2014? Purists will most likely prefer some footage from the more "authentic" period of the mid-Seventies (fortunately, there's quite a bit preserved), but the thing with ELO, really, is that (a) Jeff Lynne is one of those dudes over whom time has no control whatsoever - he still pretty much looks the same, sings the same, plays the same, and has the same corny sense of humor that he did forty years ago; (b) ever since Roy Wood left ELO, nobody in ELO has ever really mattered other than Lynne, certainly not in live performance. So if you can have your Jeff Lynne in perfect video and audio quality, playing all the beloved hits and almost none of the duds, why bother with anything else? The setlist consists of 16 numbers, EVERY one of them being a pop masterpiece - and the band, which includes at least one more veteran (Richard Tandy on keyboards), is in top shape to do them justice.
Even those who think only Roy Wood-era ELO deserves true hero status will have a big surprise waiting for them in the shape of a flawless performance of '10538 Overture':
Typically, bands like ELO with their kind of sound are far better suited for the studio than the live experience - there's no room for improvisation, and the emotional effect is very much dependent on getting the polyphonic sound exactly right - but this is precisely where modern sound-generating and sound-capturing technologies come to the rescue, and why I actually enjoy this more than, say, the Wembley recordings from the late 1970s.
Album of the week: Blood Incantation - Hidden History Of The Human Race
I know that RateYourMusic has an oddly out-of-bounds fetish for all things metal, and I'm certainly not going to listen to another metal album just because it's in the current top-100, but it's been a long time since I subjected myself to some good old-fashioned death metal, so I thought, hell, why not. Apparently, these guys hail from Denver, Colorado, and while I know absolutely nothing about the Colorado death metal scene, I'm guessing that the Grand Canyon and all the dinosaur experience are just as good in terms of influence and inspiration as the fjords and peaks of snowy Scandinavia. Because these guys are actually fun, at least for a short while.
There is absolutely nothing innovative about this stuff (except for, perhaps, certain atmospheric ambient passages that are their main claim to "merging death metal with psychedelia", but they always serve as interludes anyway), but the sound is thick and juicy, the riffs are distinctive, the solos are technically unimpeachable, and the growling vocals are well tucked into the background so that the eeriness is not completely offset by the ridiculousness. The bad thing is that they never really stop for one second to ask themselves the question, "how can we make this thing REALLY terrifying?" (like, say, a Celtic Frost). The good thing is that they have such superb production values that you really get to feel it in your bones just how massive and overwhelming a well-oiled death metal machine can get.
The album is pretty short, just 4 tracks running under 40 minutes, but still feels overlong in places, especially because they decided to make the final track into a lengthy multi-part suite without a particularly good reason. The lyrics are not worth discussing, either, just some random apocalyptic New Age shit ("quantum desolation opens the Gate of Mind" and the like). But I like the energy level, and perhaps death metal is one of those genres which, since it was never all that great in the first place, could actually benefit from modern production values rather than sound like a pale shadow of its former self wrapped up in shinier clothes.
Here's the album's instrumental track that is probably the most creative of the bunch, constructing a crescendo from ambient atmospherics to apocalyptic pomp and then to all-out blood rage:
Video of the week: Heaven & Hell - Radio City Music Hall Live 2007
Since we're on a metal vibe anyway, I haven't seen a particularly large amount of metal concerts, but this one is kinda special. Unfortunately, classic Ozzy- or Dio-era Black Sabbath have very little high quality footage left behind them, and more recent Ozzy-led Sabbath videos suffer because of... well, Ozzy. But when Iommi and Butler went on tour with Dio in the mid-2000s, Ronnie was still in peak form (in fact, he probably left peak form the day he died), and this show is an absolute must-have for all lovers of good old fashioned heavy metal. They play most of the highlights from the 1980-81 Dio period of Sabbath, and the dedication is simply astonishing - as is the image and sound quality, which gave me a new level respect for that material (which I, like many others, used to regard as too corny and cartoonish). This, too, is one of those shows where you'd expect self-parodic deterioration on the part of aging rock dinosaurs, but the thing is, Tony consistently plays better here than on the old studio recordings - particularly his soloing is impressive - and Dio is totally free from studio restraint, while at the same time always remaining in tight control of his voice. Even if mystically flavored theatrical heavy metal isn't your thing at all, I can't imagine not being impressed by the amazing tightness and inspired exuberance of the band. If you can only allow yourself one live DVD with Iommi on it, definitely go for this one rather than for any actual Sabbath concerts, even if those allegedly feature better song material.
Here's an example of a song that I never ever paid much attention to on the original Heaven & Hell album, but which I ended up watching at least a couple dozen times. Gotta just love the "evil cackle" of Tony's guitar at 3:20 - corny the song may be, but how many people ever get to scale that particular level of sonic painting?
What with all the talks about diversity, it seems that more popular artists these days emerge from one and one place only - London, England - than back in musty old 1964. These particular guys, who have named themselves after a silly digital gimmick, are occasionally toted as the current saviors of at least math-rock, if not prog-rock as a whole, so I checked the record out with interest. Apparently, they even played live with the legendary Damo Suzuki (of one-time Can fame), and if this isn't an endorsement, I don't know what is.
Approximately one and a half listen to Schlagenheim yields no final verdict, but the interest has largely been satiated. Disassembling the sound leads to the following conclusions - these guys have a really good, all-over-the-place drummer, who is almost singlehandedly responsible for the energy level; a professional, but unremarkable bassist; and two guitar players who seem to have honestly passed their exams in King Crimson-style playing, but are advancing that art about as far as I am advancing the art of writing in the English language (which is to say, backwards rather than forwards). On top of that, they have a very ugly vocalist who would perhaps be suitable for a post-punk band, but not for a math-rock outfit like this. In fact, killing the vocals altogether would have been preferable for this thing.
It's not ALL jagged-edge math-rock, though: the record has plenty of lyrical moments, and the boys' bag of influences clearly covers Yes and Genesis just as naturally as it covers King Crimson, Pere Ubu and Primus. The problem is, if they ARE adding a new twist to all those old-school influences, I cannot even express in words what it is. In terms of virtuosity, they are nothing particularly special (the already forgotten Adebisi Shank were a far tighter and more complex band, and those guys never got their dues - admittedly, Wexford, Ireland is a bit more obscure than London, England). In terms of memorable melodies, well... listen to the opening riff of the opening track on the album and, believe you me, this is as memorable as it ever gets. In terms of it all making sense... well, it doesn't. They're just making lots of organized noise. Also, they stole the bassline of "bmbmbm" from Alan Parsons Project's 'The Raven', so there. And for just about every song on here, I could name half a dozen prog / fusion / math-rock classics that do this shit better.
But if you haven't done your homework on those genres properly, who knows, maybe you'll love this. Plus, they seem to be very young kids, maybe one day they'll figure out their own sense of purpose:
Video of the week: King Crimson - Live In Japan 1984
Naturally, watching and listening to this couldn't save me from associations with the mighty Crims, so why not profit from the moment by drawing attention to this? For all his love for capturing concert performances on tape, Fripp is a known enemy of the camera, and his discomfort seems to extend to professional filming - there are very few official videos of KC concerts out there. Fortunately, at least we have this bunch of footage from a Tokyo concert hall on April 28, 1984 - just three months away from the legendary Absent Lovers performance - and it is a fantastic show, capturing the (arguably) best live version of KC in all its glory. Much of the fascination, like with a great classic Who video, comes from watching the distinctly different musical personalities harmonize with each other - the unmovable Fripp on his stool vs. the madly flapping Adrian Belew, or the oddly insectoid Tony Levin flashing his weird bass instruments vs. the steady man-machine of Bill Bruford. Great setlist, decent (not phenomenal) camera angles, a couple superfluous psychedelic effects here and there, and tons of energy - above everything else, one simply HAS to see actual human beings generating this kind of sound in order to believe it.
Here's 'Frame By Frame' which deserves to be worshipped frame by frame - enjoy it while it lasts, the Frippolice will be there any minute now:
