Tag: Rock

CAN – Out of Reach

Out of Reach

CAN – Out of Reach Harvest 1C 066-32 715 (1978)

Widely regarded as the worst CAN album — it was for a long time omitted from a reissue program.  No doubt, this is not music quite like what the band was making from 1968-74, for a number of reasons.  This comes across as a bit slight most of the time.  And another reviewer was probably right to say, “About half of this is merely OK; the other half is terrible.  I’ll leave you to decide which half is which.”  And yet, on the whole, this is passable enough.  If there is a parallel, it would be The Beach Boys when they brought in Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin, and in the years that followed when the band flirted with disco and such.  In CAN’s case, it was new members Rosko Gee and Reebop Kwaku Baah from Traffic.  There is a pronounced shift here with a focus on club/disco music and easygoing, grooving prog rock.  If there is one thing that annoys urban elites, of the sort who are the main body of supporters of avant garde acts like CAN, it is to dally with the music of the uneducated rabble, which is a big part of the demographic of disco, and groove rock.  There is a tendency to consider any engagement with disco (or groove rock), and its fans, to be inherently slight.  Maybe, or maybe it is just elitist bigotry?  Frankly, Rosko Gee’s songs (“Pauper’s Daughter and I,” “Give Me No ‘Roses'”) are not bad, just quite different from the sort of music CAN fans were accustomed to from the band.  But this is just like Fataar and Chaplin’s contributions to The Beach Boys (“Leaving This Town,” “Hold on Dear Brother”).  Still, this is a pretty middling album at best, and much of it feels worn out.  But taken entirely on its own terms it works adequately enough as background music.  That is not much of an endorsement, which the album wouldn’t deserve, yet in the right setting it sounds perfectly okay.  The better songs are in the middle of the album (the end of side one and the beginning of side two in the original LP format).  Should I feel bad about kind of liking this, mediocre or not?  Nah.

Faust – The Faust Tapes

The Faust Tapes

Faust – The Faust Tapes Virgin VC 501 (1973)

Faust was never a “commercial” sort of band.  But following complaints of low sales they switched to a new label and producer Uwe Nettelbeck struck a deal with a new label, Virgin, where he gave them Faust recordings for nothing and the label released them at a discount price (a full LP for the price of a single) aimed at the British market.  This proved to be boon for the band, with the album becoming their best-selling and most widely known by a substantial margin.  It is stitched together from bits and pieces of recordings into two seamless “suites” of sort.

As fragmentary as the recordings are, and despite the jumps between disparate styles, bits of highly melodic pop appear with some regularity — like a the catchy, rhythmic blasts of fuzz guitar that begin about seven minutes into side one, which provides a mini-song that irreverently confronts a state of mechanical, detached and indifference.  I once told someone that the band Deerhoof‘s album Reveille sounded like The Beatles had replaced Paul McCartney with Yoko Ono.  Regardless of whether that held in that case, it isn’t an entirely bad description of The Faust Tapes.  Certainly, casual pop listeners will be put off.  Yet that is kind of the point.  This is music that pays no deference to commercial, mainstream pop/rock music, even as it accepts that sort of music on the same terms as everything else.  The resultant amalgam of sounds allows the music to shift from the dour to the sprightly and back, and back again, with the impression that the listener is hearing only the best bits.  Or not.  Suffice it to say, there is an impudence at work that is ready and willing to clash with the status quo while at the same time winning over adherents with a likable goofiness and almost absurdist humor.  Definitely an important (however unlikely) statement from one of the bands that fought the good fight.

For more, read an excellent review here.

Leonard Cohen – Death of a Ladies’ Man

Death of a Ladies' Man

Leonard Cohen – Death of a Ladies’ Man Warner Bros. BS 3125 (1977)

If it’s anything, this album is frustrating.  It is basically two entirely different albums smashed together — and they go together like oil and water.  Phil Spector provides a dense, rich backdrop in which Leonard Cohen’s songs and voice seem entirely lost.  At his most effective, Cohen’s music has a personal intimacy that seems to speak directly to the listener.  Spector’s music, on the other hand, revels in a kind of jubilant — even garish — kind of festive quality, which is fit for dancing and get-togethers.  Together, Spector and Cohen are a match made south of heaven.  On Death of a Ladies Man, Spector is doing what he always does, hardly different from anything he did with The Ronettes, etc.  He doesn’t give an inch.  Cohen is writing some excellent songs, ones that embody a late-Seventies come-down and are filled with an incisive sense of resignation and disappointment.  But finding your way to Cohen’s astute lyrics is far more of a chore than it needs to be.  As a singer, Cohen is unsuited to this kind of musical setting.  His limited vocal abilities don’t exactly allow him to pull a voice like Ronnie Spector or Tina Turner out of his back pocket.  That puts more of the blame on Phil Spector for the underwhelming results.  Even if the musical backdrop is fine in and of itself, it needs to suit the star performer.  Spector’s production would have befitted, say, Scott Walker (now there was a missed opportunity!).  Here, it’s all wrong.  This record is a minor disaster saved only by the fact that concentrated effort reveals a lot of substance in Cohen’s lyrics.  As an aside, it is interesting that some of Cohen’s vocal duets with Ronee Blakley distinctly recall Bob Dylan‘s with Emmylou Harris on Desire from a year earlier (and Dylan, along with Allen Ginsburg, makes a cameo appearance here on “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On”).

Patti Smith – Trampin’

Trampin'

Patti Smith – Trampin’ Columbia CK 90330 (2004)

The title track is quite good (it’s indebted to Marian Anderson‘s version from He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands), as are “Radio Baghdad” and “Gandhi” (“Cash” is decent too).  The rest is dreck.  Most of this is just over-polished, boilerplate stuff played by a band lead by noticeably over-the-hill rockers.  The songs often sound stiff, like the rote hard rock of “Stride of the Mind.”  Gung Ho may never have really achieved a level of excitement, or offered anything of anthemic power, while Trampin’ does reach those heights.  But this album also scrapes the bottom of the barrel of feigned significance on “Jubilee,” “My Blakean Year” and “Trespasses.”  Unfortunately, the merits of a few really nice songs are lost amongst the rest of this miserable garbage.

Pere Ubu – St. Arkansas

St. Arkansas

Pere Ubu – St. Arkansas spinART SPART 108 (2002)

Approaching its third decade as a band, Pere Ubu sounded surprising close to its late 1970s roots on St. Arkansas.  If “avant garage” has long been the term of choice to describe their style of rock and roll, it remains the right way to describe this album.  As a band, they thrive on the fringe of acceptability.

St. Arkansas is a road album. David Thomas reportedly wrote the words from Conway, Arkansas to Tupelo, Mississippi, from I-40 to U.S. 49 to State 6.  Movement is implied in the songs, compiled from isolated moments and drawn into a surreal reflection of americana, as if passed by in a moving car, in a blur.

“The Fevered Dream of Hernando DeSoto” opens the disc very much in the band’s style of old.  But this isn’t purely a retreat into the past.  St. Arkansas has gems to offer both newcomers and Pere Ubu’s cult following.  At times the album grooves (“333” and the Brian Wilson-meets-Ray Davies sounding “Phone Home Jonah”), while other times it perplexes at a halting pace (“Michele”).

Pere Ubu’s lineup of the last five years can coax a balance out of extremes. The liner notes suggest: “Most people know that by moving between the two speakers of your hi fi system a point can be located at which the sound seems to lock into place. Ordinarily this is the point that forms an equilateral triangle with the two sound sources.  With Pere Ubu, however, this point has been located directly in front of the right hand source.  There are reasons for this.”  If this all seems very deliberate, know that the production on this album is a little raw and hollow.  It’s not terrible, but it seems somewhat underbaked overall.

This is a good one, and it is worth saying again that it is probably the closest to the band’s 1970s sound as anything since that time — if that’s your thing.  Yet it is a notch below the underrated return to form album Ray Gun Suitcase, which has the advantage in freshness and inventive techniques, even if it is less song-driven.

Pere Ubu – Ray Gun Suitcase

Ray Gun Suitcase

Pere Ubu – Ray Gun Suitcase Cooking Vinyl COOK CD 089 (1995)

Pere Ubu were one of the stranger rock bands to emerge from the punk era.  But by the late 1980s their sound shifted to a more pop-focused arena.  1995’s Ray Gun Suitcase was a sort of return to a rock sound.  The band’s lineup had changed a lot since the 1970s, so this is closer to the “alternative rock” milieu than punk, but there are hints of the band of old — such as electronic effects by Robert Wheeler that recall Allen Ravenstine‘s experiments of the past.  What is most new here are the song structures, many of which play like mini-suites with numerous shifts in tone.  Also, there is an emphasis on theatrics, in the formal sense.  Singer David Thomas adopts affected singing techniques that seem drawn from avant-garde theater (“Vacuum in My Head”).  So guitarist Jim Jones plays some driving, anthemic riffs, but those come and go in any given song.  The bass (Michele Temple, plus Paul Hamann) is prominent, and the overall sound is crisp but full, with a lot of separation that lends an almost hollow effect.  There are definite rhythms and melodies and chord progressions, but also atonal interjections and other elements at odds with convention.  Overall, the subject matter of the songs seems to look back a bit, with an interest in “Americana,” but for the purpose of understanding what cultural history means for the future — this is not nostalgic navel-gazing by any means.  This would establish a foundation for much of what the band pursued for the next decade.

David Bowie – Santa Monica ’72

Santa Monica '72

David Bowie – Santa Monica ’72 MainMan GY002 (1994)

A few of the slow songs drag, but mostly this is a fine set from the peak of Bowie’s glam period.  Mick Ronson proves to be as much the star as Bowie himself.  It’s interesting to know these guys were performing “I’m Waiting for the Man,” and quite well actually.  For what it’s worth, this was recorded during the Ziggy Stardust tour, but only released over two decades later.

Link Wray – Be What You Want to

Be What You Want to

Link Wray – Be What You Want to Polydor PD 5047 (1973)

After releasing the lo-fi cult classic Link Wray, recorded in a converted chicken coop on his family’s farm, Link Wray made overt efforts to produce a more commercially palatable sound on this, another of his albums for a major-label contract with Polydor.  He had done that before.  The new recordings on Yesterday — Today leaned toward the hippie rock of the Woodstock generation, and earlier Link had made forays into the teen idol realm.  It’s hard to blame him, because he was always better than his sales and popularity reflected.  Just don’t come to Be What You Want to expecting the wild rockabilly of his 1950s and early 60s output.  This is country-rock — comparisons to Squeeze and Behind Closed Doors (both released the same year) are appropriate.  Yet Link, as usual, gives it just enough twists to keep it interesting.  Though this may try to be a fairly generic country-rock outing, complete with guest spots from Jerry Garcia, Peter Kaukonen, and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, the results are above-average.  The highlight is probably the title track.