Into Bataille with the Express of New Music

 

This is what I grew up reading, kids! Page 3 of the NME! Or maybe Page 5! At any rate, right up front, not tucked away in some ghetto section like Books, but considered as newsworthy and relevant to the readers's interests as hotshit new band Shillelagh Sisters or whatever other Bad Music Era offering featured in that week's issue. (This is September 1984).

NME literally throwing "filth at our pop kids" to use an oft jokily used phrase of the time (originally a tabloid newspaper headline complaining about the Sex Pistols on Bill Grundy).

That said, I don't remember actually reading this Boy Georges paean at the time. 

I think I found my way to Bataille independently - or possibly it was via some quote or namedrop in a piece on a band (quite likely the dropper in question would have been Barney Hoskyns)

There being this thing called the Internet, you can find traces of documentation about the Visible Silence event at the Bloomsbury Theatre..

Here's Cosey Fanni Tutti talking about GB. And her performance was videotaped and sold. 

Here's a preview in another publication (City Limits?)

Here's Marc Almond's contribution to the event. 

Stephen Holden - Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns - Rolling Stone - January 15 1976

Continuing the series of critics wrong-footed in real-time, here's Rolling Stoner Stephen Holden on Joni Mitchell's The Hissing of Summer Lawns - which he finds overly detached, blandly jazz-ified, and deficient in melody (!)

A classic LA album for a not-so-classic time in LA's life.... the title even has a water supply / keeping vegetation lush and non-combustible association...  the hissing of said sprinklers at night is one of the distinctive pleasantly-eerie,  peripheral-audition, edge-of-ASMR aspects of Los Angeles as soundscape

JONI MITCHELL

The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Rolling Stone, January 15 1976

by Stephen Holden

With The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Joni Mitchell has moved beyond personal confession into the realm of social philosophy. All the characters are American stereotypes who act out socially determined rituals of power and submission in exquisitely described settings. Mitchell's eye for detail is at once so precise and so panoramic that one feels these characters have very little freedom. They belong to the things they own, wear and observe, to the drugs they take and the people they know as much if not more than to themselves. Most are fixed combatants in tableaux, rituals and scenarios that share Mitchell's reflections on feminism.

As might be expected, Mitchell's approach is very cerebral. In "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow," a poem of almost impenetrable mystery, she voices the core of her vision. Among other things, the song parallels modern forms of female subjugation with both Christian and African mythology in imagery that is disjunctive and telegraphic:

He says "Your notches liberation doll"

And he chains me with that serpent

To that Ethiopian wall

Winds of change patriarchs

Snug in your bible belt dreams.

"Edith and the Kingpin," a nightmarish urban tableau, portrays a pimp/pusher/mobster initiating a new girl into his stable of dope-entranced concubines. "The Jungle Line" also uses drug dealing as an effective metaphor for sexual and racial enslavement. Here again, Mitchell, never one to disavow the powerful glamour of evil, pulls a brilliant twist, uniting images of cannibalism, wild animals, slave ships and industrial squalor with the gorgeously innocent paintings of imaginary jungle scenes by the late-19th-century French Primitive, Henri Rousseau.

Always Mitchell displays enough moral ambiguity in her lyrics to avoid condescension; her latent impulse to anger is consistently redeemed by a compassionate, seemingly genuine sorrow, as well as by a visual artist's impulse to perceive the beauty in all things. The tension between Mitchell's moral and aesthetic principles is resolved with special grace in "Shades of Scarlet Conquering," the full-scale portrait of a southern belle very similar to Tennessee Williams's Blanche DuBois. Here Mitchell's feminist sensibility is implicit in her compassion:

Beauty and madness to be praised

It is not easy to be brave

To walk around in so much need

To carry the weight of all that greed

If Mitchell's view of the outcome of feminist struggle seems pessimistic, it is not totally hopeless. "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" and "Harry's House—Centerpiece" pose opposite solutions to a similar situation: the suburban wife as her husband's captive trophy—materially comfortable but emotionally and spiritually famished. In the first song, the wife remains with her husband:

Still she stays with a love of some kind

It's the lady's choice

The hissing of summer lawns

In the second, which is far superior, she leaves him. Here Mitchell's lyric evokes genuine conflict. Her excited fascination with the chic kineticism of New York high life sets up the tension between a life the writer perceives as attractive but dangerous as well:

He opens up his suitcase

In the continental suite

And people twenty stories down

Colored currents in the street

A helicopter lands on the Pan Am roof

Like a dragonfly on a tomb

The song then segues effortlessly into the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross tune, "Centerpiece," whose smug marriage proposal (" 'Cause nothing's any good without you/Baby you're my centerpiece") in the context of Mitchell's story seems devastatingly sexist and shallow as well as seductively hip. The song, moreover, doesn't disown the wife's responsibility for the marriage and its breakup. In the coda, the abandoned husband remembers his wife with her "Shining hair and shining skin/Shining as she reeled him in." Mitchell understands the enormous power and restlessness of a true siren.

Images of entrapment and enslavement (an artist to his patrons) also inform "The Boho Dance," the album's other song set in New York. Inspired by The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe's clever diatribe against the art world establishment, this recollected dialogue depicts the hypocrisy of a scene that only pretends not to be thoroughly commercialized.

Two philosophic songs, "Sweet Bird" and "Shadows and Light," fill out the album's schematic concept. The first is a serene meditation, tinged with sadness, on the fading of youth ("all these vain promises on beauty jars") that develops into a fatalistic lament for all that will eventually be extinct.

In sharp contrast to the languid reflectiveness of "Sweet Bird," "Shadows and Light," Mitchell's first venture into a quasi-liturgical writing style, stands halfway between incantatory prayer and sermon and also unravels some of the clues to the mystery of "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow." The song unites the antinomies of beauty and evil, freedom and slavery in a supremely relativistic statement of personal faith. While acknowledging the power of devils and gods, Mitchell perceives them as male myths, necessary for the creation of inevitably patriarchal systems. But "laws governing wrong and right," Mitchell recognizes, are "ever broken."

If The Hissing of Summer Lawns offers substantial literature, it is set to insubstantial music. There are no tunes to speak of. Since Blue, Mitchell's interest in melody has become increasingly eccentric, and she has relied more and more on lyrics and elaborate production. This parallels Mitchell's growing interest in jazz, a form that would seem the ideal vehicle for developing her gift.

Four members of Tom Scott's L.A. Express are featured on Hissing, but their uninspired jazz-rock style completely opposes Mitchell's romantic style. Always distinctly modal, Mitchell's tunes for the first time often lack harmonic focus. They are free-form in the most self-indulgent sense, i.e., they exist only to carry the lyrics. With the exceptions of "Shades of Scarlet Conquering" and "Sweet Bird," neither of which boasts a strong tune but at least have appropriately lovely textures, the arrangements are as pretentiously chic as they are boring.

The album's most flagrant example of pseudo-avant-gardism is the drum- and synthesizer-dominated arrangement for "The Jungle Line." Where Mitchell's "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire" from For the Roses was a truly sinister evocation of addiction, its angular tune coiling on an intensely seductive vocal track, "The Jungle Line," which is quite similar in theme, sounds brittle, gimmicky and enervated. "Shadows and Light" suffers from too many vocal overdubs and a synthesizer that sounds like a long, solemn fart. The only catchy melody is the non-original "Centerpiece," and it lacks altogether the wit, sophistication and inventiveness of "Twisted," Mitchell's earlier excursion into the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross catalog.

If Joni Mitchell intends to experiment further with jazz, she ought to work with an artist of her own stature, someone like pianist Keith Jarrett whose jazz-classical compositions are spiritually and romantically related to Mitchell's best work. The Hissing of Summer Lawns is ultimately a great collection of pop poems with a distracting soundtrack. Read it first. Then play it. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Amazing how literary this assessment is - as if the rippling, insistently textured music was the parchment on which the word were printed - in this case, something to be listened past, in favor of parsing the text. 

That's literally what Holden advises - "Read it first. Then play it" - go straight to the lyric sheet.

The music is mentioned, albeit only dismissively. So it's better on that score than, say, Paul Nelson entirely lyric-based appreciation of Jackson Browne's The Pretender in Stranded, which doesn't mention sound once in its 4000 words of treating Browne as a sage for the age.

The curse of Dylanism - a/k/a "Not Against Interpretation".

In this review, expectations appropriate for a novel or short story  -  that a song should contain fully etched characters, vividly alive and imbued with "freedom" - are applied to an artform in which lyrics really ought to have no more importance than the beat or instrumental texture-play.  (Even when they are of a paramount importance - arguably the case here and with Joni generally - the songwriter simply doesn't have the space, the wordage, to do something on a par with a short story, let alone a novel or a play). 

I'd say it's as if James Wood reviewed the record, except that he wrote a great essay about The Who from a just-for-fun drummer's perspective, so he has a gut understanding that rock + pop =  90 % rhythm + noise. 

Nick Kent - The Cure - Seventeen Seconds - NME - April 26 1980

 Continuing our series on critics wrong-footed in real time, here's Nick Kent immune to The Cure's Seventeen Seconds

To be honest, this is not so much a "wrong" opinion - certainly not an opinion shown up by the passage of time, by History having come to a different view - so much as an opinion that differs from my own opinion! 

The aspects that Kent finds frustrating - the vagueness, the tentativeness, the foggy pensiveness,  a sense of things being withheld, emotional indeterminacy - are exactly the  qualities of the album I find intriguing and attractive.

I feel like it's a record that could only come out of English suburbia...   (Crawley is almost exactly the same distance from London as my hometown Berkhamsted is, just on the other side of the metropolis).

Yet having said that, the atmosphere sometimes puts me in mind of Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet

Because of my life experience it inevitably conjures Home Counties memories of  listlessness-as-bliss... mystical mundanity...

A Thursday afternoon in an unseasonably damp, overcast August. Poor visibility, light drizzle muffling the sense of distance. 

The mood reminds me of this scene in Jonathan Coe's The Rotters Club - an ecstasy of ennui enfolds the main character, an introspective teenage schoolboy... Time stands still.

Interesting that Kent detects an Eno-ish aspect here and there, because the record sometimes reminds me too of the washed-out ambience and washed-up characters in certain songs on Another Green World and Before and After Science. 

I'd always thought The Cure on Seventeen Seconds were trying to pick up on the ethereal drift of side 2 of Closer - but checking the dates I see that they were making this record at around about the same time as Joy Division were working on their own second album. 

Seventeen Seconds is all about that translucent sound.... the new toys they've got for the guitar... the subtle tricks that Mike Hedges came up with (the triggered drum whooosh in "A Forest").  

Yes, for me, Seventeen Seconds is the only Cure album that I would actively put on. 

Like with New Order, the Cure's best album is obviously going to be a best-of, a singles compilation. 

Seventeen Seconds, though, is a consummate album-album... it corresponds to Trevor Horn's dictum that a great album consists of ten to twelve songs that all sound similar, just different enough- chips off the same lustrous block, as I said of Juju and a line probably recycled about various other albums over the years. (Trev's own example was Hats by The Blue Nile). It's a mood to sink into, a mood sustained and inflected. 

Having said it's an album album, Seventeen Seconds does also contain The Cure's most singular single: "A Forest", six minutes of gauche glory that sounds like nothing else in music before or since,

Kent closes his Seventeen Seconds review with a statement of being disappointed this time round but  highly intrigued to know what their next move will be -  I wonder if he did carry on following the Cure's arc and what he made of the subsequent albums, career triumphs, ever-growing megacult popularity?  Did he bother to listen to this year's "towering, best album since ____" ? (I didn't). 

Stephen Davis - Lou Reed - Berlin - Rolling Stone - December 20 1973

Continuing our series of critics wrong-footed in real-time here is Rolling Stoner Stephen Davis with a terse dismissal of Lou Reed's Berlin. 

Lou Reed 

Berlin

Rolling Stone, December 20th 1973 

by Stephen Davis

Lou Reed’s Berlin is a disaster, taking the listener into a distorted and degenerate demimonde of paranoia, schizophrenia, degradation, pill-induced violence and suicide. There are certain records that are so patently offensive that one wishes to take some kind of physical vengeance on the artists that perpetrate them. Reed’s only excuse for this kind of performance (which isn’t really performed as much as spoken and shouted over Bob Ezrin’s limp production) can only be that this was his last shot at a once-promising career. Goodbye, Lou.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Mind you, I'm not really a fan of the album myself

Dave McCullough - The Raincoats debut / The Mekons - The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen - Sounds - December 8 1979

 

Continuing the series of crits wrong-footed in real-time, unexpectedly harsh reviews from Dave McCullough for the Raincoats self-titled debut and the Mekons not-self-titled debut.

Yet I seem to remember him writing positive stuff about both earlier on?

The Mekons debut I can see perhaps an early supporter feeling that something had been lost -  a certain exuberance in the early singles that hasn't survived the transition to the major label and big studio situation. But the Raincoats is so gleefully free, it's hard to see how someone - especially at that juncture in history - wouldn't get caught up in its unruly energy. Especially if that someone was a champion of messtheticians Scritti Politti, as Dave McC was.

But McC seems to dislike both groups for being too right-on as we called it back then (the woke of its day). The review is a bit like a critic counterpart to the song genre of studentphobia.  Or perhaps the subgenre artschoolstudentphobia

See also Kevin Rowland's loathing of The Au Pairs. 

Garry Bushell - The Clash - London Calling - Sounds - December 15 1979

Resuming the series of reviews in which a critic is wrong-footed in real-time, with Garry Bushell giving a measly two-stars to the record that Rolling Stone would later anoint as Best Rock Album of the Eighties (even though technically it came out in the 1970s, at least in the band's native land, and at the very end of the decade, the last weeks of '79).

But, thinking about it, I don't even like London Calling. And all the reasons why Rolling Stone would rate it so high are exactly the reasons why Gazza finds it so boring - the relapse into Presley-Stones-etc rock's rich tapestry-ism. 

And within five years Strummer himself would be in resounding agreement with Gazza and would attempt to restage The Clash debut with Cut the Crap. 

Yes, despite various attempts over the years, I've never clicked with London Calling, apart from the title track single, and "Lost In the Supermarket," which I find affecting. 

The rest bypasses me....  it's like the Clash submitting belated candidacy to be part of the Last Waltz line-up....   a truce between New Wave and Old Wave.  (Getting Guy Stevens to produce - the man who more or less created Mott the Hoople - is totally the Old Wave into New Wave truce move).

I prefer Sandinista...  on points....  but also because they sound confused and dispirited...

The spiritedness of the Clash is one of the things I find least appealing about them - probably why I never clicked with the debut either. 

(That's why I'm endeared towards "Lost in the Supermarket" - a Strummer song, and Strummer sentiment-admission of frailty - even though it's Jones who sings it, with trademark wetness).

Pop musicians review the singles, 1 of ?? : Morrissey - Smash Hits - October 1984

 

Some surprises here - warm words for Duran Duran.

Bonus bits

Morrissey on the U.K. weekly music press.

“The British music press is an art form”

- Morrissey, Sounds, June 1983

"I grew up a chanting believer in the New Musical Express.... deep in the magazine's empirical history, the New Musical Express was a propelling force that answered to no one. It led the way by the quality of its writers - Paul Morley, Julie Burchill, Paul du Noyer, Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent, Ian Penman, Miles - who would write more words than the articles demanded, and whose views saved some of us, and who pulled us all away from the electrifying boredom of everything and anything that represented the industry. As a consequence the chanting believers of the NME could not bear to miss a single issue; the torrential fluency of its writers left almost no space between words, and the NME became a culture in itself, whereas Melody Maker or Sounds just didn't.

"The wit imitated by the 90s understudies of Morley and Burchill assumed nastiness to be greatness, and were thus rewarded. But nastiness isn't wit and no writers from the 90s NME survive. Even with sarcasm, irony and innuendo there is an art, of sorts.

"It is on the backs of writers such as Morley, Burchill, Kent and Shaar Murray that the 'new' NME hitches its mule-cart"

- Morrissey, not so long ago

Morrissey's own music journalism

I had read that he contributed to Record Mirror under the nom de plume Sheridan Whitehead, but here are some reviews under his own name. He also "contributed" by writing to the letters page of NME incessantly, mostly about New York Dolls. (About whom he also penned a fan bio published as a short book).

Dave McCullough - Siouxsie and the Banshees - A Kiss in the Dreamhouse - Sounds - November 6 1982

 

Continuing the series of reviews where critics get wrong-footed in their real-time reactions to an album, here is Dave McCullough mystifyingly underwhelmed by Siouxsie and the Banshees's A Kiss In The Dreamhouse. If not indisputably their best album, it's certainly right up there, and it's definitely their most expansive and experimental effort - but here it gets a measly three stars and is judged to be a misfire..

I also found it puzzling that he harps on about John McGeoch as the record's star and saving grace, because it doesn't leap out to my ears as a guitar-dominated record...  McGeoch is much more the forefront dominant on Kaleidoscope and Juju, I'd have said. 

(Check out the continuously ever-expanding Dave McCullough Archive)

Garry Bushell - Gang of Four - Entertainment! - Sounds - October 6 1979

Not quite an example of critics totally missing the significance of an epochal record in real time, as this does get a measured 3 and a half stars out of five from Gaz, with Entertainment! further described as "erratically brilliant".  

Included in the series more because the critique comes from a well-informed position (SWP member conversant with Brecht etc) yet advances a stance contrary to the now historically sanctioned viewpoint (here it is arty postpunk that's deemed is the wrong direction out of punk, the diversion of energy).  Instead of "rip it up and start again", it's more like "reiterate it and stay street". 

Rose Rouse - Kate Bush - The Dreaming - Sounds - November 1982

Continuing the series of critics getting it wrong in real-time, not divining the significance of a release or artist... here's Rose Rouse in Sounds underestimating Kate Bush's The Dreaming.

Still, in mitigation, it would have to be said that Rose was not alone here - in fact Bush had almost zero critical support from the thinking person's press at this time - that all came with The Hounds of Love

And as slag-offs go, it's well argued and even somewhat convincing. 

Lester Bangs on Miles Davis (originally published Phonograph Record, June 1976; republished NME, April 30 1983)

Continuing the series of critics missing the significance of a record on its initial release - here is Lester Bangs in 1976 with what is ostensibly a review of Agharta but is really a panoramic takedown of Miles Davis after In A Silent Way. It's included here mainly for its utterly wrongheaded take on On The Corner and similarly dismissive reaction to Get Up With It. 

Originally published in Phonograph Record in June 1976, the piece was reprinted in NME in 1983 as a tribute following Bangs's death and that's what is reproduced here (to read it in full you might need to download the images - but there is a portion of it in text form below). 

By the end of the 1970s Bangs completely changed his tune and decided that On The Corner was genius and in some piece or other (corralled in Psychotic Reactions) declared that he would stake his writing life on Get Up With It and Metal Box. 

Nowadays you will get lists that place On the Corner as #1 Miles album.

 

".... But here I sit, nearly three years later, and this man and his music refuse to ease their stranglehold on my tastes, more, my emotions. I am obsessed with him because he once released Sketches of Spain, which contains an adagio passage in Rodrigo’s ‘Concierto De Aranjuen’ which may hold more distilled sorrow than any other single solo by anyone I have ever heard; I am obsessed with him because Kind of Blue, like Birth of the Cool a decade previous, defined an era and produced some of the most beautiful, spacious, expansively inspired music it was to know; I’m obsessed because In a Silent Way came close to changing my life, reinstalling a respect for the truly spiritual aspects of music when I was otherwise intent on wallowing in grits and metal; I’m obsessed, simply because he is Miles, one of the greatest musicians who ever lived, and when a giant gets cancer of the soul you have to weep or at least ask for a medical inquiry.

Which is why I have been studying Miles’ work for the past year or so, trying to figure out where (if?) he went wrong. Think about the fact that this guy has been making “jazz” records since the late Forties, and that many of them, way more than any single musician’s share, have become (to borrow the title of one) milestones. The man has defined at least three eras in American music – can Dylan say the same? Never mind that when In a Silent Way came out it had the same effect as Charlie Parker’s renaissance and influence on his followers – i.e., it ruined a whole generation of musicians who were so swept by its brilliant departure that they could do nothing but slavishly imitate so every goddamn album you heard dribbled the same watered-down-kitsch-copy of Miles’ electric cathedral – it remains that now, seven years later. In a Silent Way not only has not dated but stands with Sketches of Spain and a few other Miles albums as one of the sonic monuments of our time. And that’s neither hype nor hyperbole.

But since then, the years, private problems, celebrityhood, hipper-than-thous – something, whatever, has taken its toll. On the Corner was garbage. So was, with the possible exception of one bit I have been told about but am unable to find in its four unbounded 30-minute sides, Miles Davis in Concert, Big Fun and Get Up with It were largely left-overs, with predictably erratic results. The former’s “Go Ahead John” was a cooker, but too much of the rest was something never previously expected of Miles, simple ideas repeated for whole sides, up to a half hour each, in an electronicized receptiveness and distortion-for-its-own-sake that may have been intended as hypnotic but ended up merely static. What was perhaps even more disturbing was that once you got past the predictability and disappointment and analyzed the actual content of the music, it took Miles past his traditional (and traditionally heart-wrenching) penchant for sustained moods of deep sadness into a new area redolent more of a by turns muzzy and metallic unhappiness. He should have called one of these albums Kind of Grim. And mere unhappiness, elaborated at whatever electro-technocratic prolixity, is not nearly the same as anguish.

Much of Miles’ finest music, from Blue Moods to “Prayer” on Porgy and Bess to Sketches to My Funny Valentine, has been about inner pain translated into a deep mourning poetry so intense and distilled that there have been times when I (and others have reported similar reactions) have been almost literally unable to take it. I have always been offended when people ask me to take off any jazz record because they find it “depressing,” but secretly I always knew what they meant. Because there were times when I found Miles’ anguish not purgative but depressing, when I had to yank Jack Johnson out of the 8-track deck because I could not drive to the laundromat with such a weight on my heart; but I also knew the reason why I (and, if I may be presumptuous, the nebulous anti-jazz people I just mentioned) was depressed: because at that moment there was something wrong with me, of a severity that could reach by degrees from my consciousness to my heart to my soul; because I was sweeping some deep latent anguish under the emotional carpet, or not confronting myself on some primal level – and Miles cut through to that level. His music was that powerful: it exposed me to myself, to my own falsity, to my own cowardice in the face of dread of staved-off pain. Because make no mistake, Miles understands pain – and he will pry it out of your soul’s very core when he hits his supreme note and you happen, coincidentally, to be a bit of an open emotional wound at that moment yourself. It is this gift for open-heart surgery that makes him the supreme artist that he is. So, obviously, I am damned if I am going to shrug him off at this point. I am going to tear these fucking records apart and find out what the source of the cancer running through them is, praying for cure....."

He's not wrong about the soul-sickness in Miles's music of the 1970s... but for the life of me I can't see why he didn't recognise that this made this music compelling, a puzzle worth solving. 

^^^^^^^^^

Here as a chaser is Bangs getting it right in real time:  a rhapsody about In A Silent Way for Rolling Stone. 

Miles Davis

In A Silent Way

by Lester Bangs

This is the kind of album that gives you faith in the future of music. It is not rock and roll, but it’s nothing stereotyped as jazz either. All at once, it owes almost as much to the techniques developed by rock improvisors in the last four years as to Davis’ jazz background. It is part of a transcendental new music which flushes categories away and, while using musical devices from all styles and cultures, is defined mainly by its deep emotion and unaffected originality.

Miles has always gone his own way, a musician of strength and dignity who has never made the compromise (so poisonous to jazz now) with “pop” fads. It is a testimony to his authenticity that he has never worried about setting styles either, but continued his deeply felt experiment for two decades now. Albums like Miles Ahead, Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain simply do not get old, and contain some of the most moving experiences that any music has to offer. In his new album, the best he has made in some time, he turns to “space music” and a reverent, timeless realm of pure song, the kind of music which comes along ever so often and stops us momentarily, making us think that this perhaps is the core around which all of our wayward musical highways have revolved, the primal yet futuristic and totally uncontrived sound which gives the deepest, most lasting sustenance to our souls, the living contemporary definition of great art.

The songs are long jams with a minimum of preplanned structure. That they are so cohesive and sustained is a testament to the experience and sensitivity of the musicians involved. Miles’ lines are like shots of distilled passion, the kind of evocative, liberating riffs that decades of strivers build their styles on. Aside from Charles Mingus, there is no other musician alive today who communicates such a yearning, controlled intensity, the transformation of life’s inchoate passions and tensions into aural adventures that find a permanent place in your consciousness and influence your basic definitions of music. And his sidemen also rise to the occasion, most of them playing better than I have ever heard them before. Certainly Herbie Hancock (piano), Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), and Joe Zawinul (organ) have never seemed so transported. The miracle of jazz is that a great leader can bring merely competent musicians to incredible heights of inspiration —; Mingus has always been famous for this, and Miles has increasingly proven himself a master of this incredibly delicate art.

The first side is taken up by a long jam called “Shhh/Peaceful.” Tony Williams’ cymbal-and-brush work and the subtle arabesques of Zawinul’s organ set a space trip, a mood of suspended time and infinite interior vistas. But when Miles enters, the humanity and tenderness of his trumpet’s soft cries are enough to bring you tears. I’ve heard that when he was making this album, Miles had been listening to Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone, but the feeling here is closer to something like “2000 Light Years From Home” by the Stones. It is space music, but with an overwhelmingly human component that makes it much more moving and enduring than most of its rock counterparts.

Side two opens and closes with the best song on the album, a timeless trumpet prayer called “In a Silent Way.” There has always been something eternal and pure in Miles’ music, and this piece captures that quality as well as anything he’s ever recorded. If, as I believe, Miles is an artist for the ages, then this piece will be among those that stand through those vast tracks of time to remind future generations of the oneness of human experience.

Between the two takes of “Silent Way” lies “It’s About That Time,” a terse, restrained space jam somewhat reminiscent of the one on the first side but a bit sharper, allowing more of Miles’ fierce blues ethos to burn through. This is the one that might be connected to Miles’ interest in Hendrix and Sly.

They say that jazz has become menopausal, and there is much truth in the statement. Rock too seems to have suffered under a numbing plethora of standardized Sounds. But I believe there is a new music in the air, a total art which knows no boundaries or categories, a new school run by geniuses indifferent to fashion. And I also believe that the ineluctable power and honesty of their music shall prevail. Miles Davis is one of those geniuses.

^^^^^^^^^

Not one of his great reviews - often in praise mode he over-relies on these windy vague terms, a rather standard lexicon of humanist-literary approbation. “Timeless”, “heights of inspiration”, “the oneness of human experience”. Almost a sense of being intimidated by the subject.

^^^^^^^^^^^

And here's me with the benefit of hindsight - but well before it became a fashionable opinion - bigging up OTC. August 17 1991, Melody Maker

Some windy, lofty lingo in there - and below too.

From a few years earlier - September 2 1989 - a paean to Silent Way. 

Mick Farren - The Stooges

 

Not sure which publication this was in - probably International Times - but this could be the start of a sporadic series: reviews in which critics don't perceive the significance of something at the time of its release. 

Interesting, though, that the one track Farren digs and praises is "We Will Fall" - the track that most Stooges fans find tedious and interminable.

Contradicting his own point, it also the one with the least "live" energy.

But he's right - "We Will Fall" is a great track, precisely for its droning narcotic lassitude - the absence of kinetic-ballistic energy.  Attributing it all to John Cale strikes me as unfair, but it does indeed resemble The Marble Index relocated to Michigan. 

Personally I never had any problem with its protractedness or inertia - always loved it.  Plus it functions similarly as side-one ender to "Dirt" on Fun House. 

It's an atmosphere to sink into.  An ambience somewhere between an opium den and a temple. Sinister ceremonies, rituals of annulment. It could go on for ever.

"Ann", on the flipside, starts with a similar kind of limpid limpness - before erupting (erecting) with rampaging desire.

What's this "Dance of Romance"? Presumably an ironic title -  courtship, wooing, seduction, cloaking the animal reality. 

I could go for a 70 minute version honestly.

Julian Cope - Tales from the Drug Attic (psych + 60s garage + freakbeat paean) - NME - December 3 1983

 

 

pop groups reviewing the singles, a series / 1 of ? - Prefab Sprout

source unknown  (Record Mirror?)

date: spring 1984? 

Tracie Responds (boom boom)

Dave Hill - Heavy Metal Holocaust - NME - August 1981

 

Mark Cordery - Dexys Midnight Runners - The Old Vic - NME, November 21 1981

 

Here's a review I never forgot.

Possibly the accusation  - "Emotional Fascism"  - seems in retrospect a little harsh, considering what Dexys soon became (jolly jigsters circa Too-Rye-Aye....  harmless has-beens / heroes-to-some thereafter...). Also in light of Rowland's evidently troubled soul. 

Still, as a real-time reaction of repugnance, this is forcefully argued, I think