Friday, February 7, 2025
Into Bataille with the Express of New Music
Saturday, January 18, 2025
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.
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
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
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).
Sunday, January 5, 2025
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
Thursday, January 2, 2025
Dave McCullough - The Raincoats debut / The Mekons - The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen - Sounds - December 8 1979
Sunday, December 15, 2024
Garry Bushell - The Clash - London Calling - Sounds - December 15 1979
Thursday, December 5, 2024
Pop musicians review the singles, 1 of ?? : Morrissey - Smash Hits - October 1984
“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).
Friday, November 29, 2024
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)
Saturday, November 2, 2024
Garry Bushell - Gang of Four - Entertainment! - Sounds - October 6 1979
Saturday, October 26, 2024
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.
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Saturday, October 12, 2024
Lester Bangs on Miles Davis (originally published Phonograph Record, June 1976; republished NME, April 30 1983)
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....."
Sunday, October 6, 2024
Mick Farren - The Stooges
Monday, September 30, 2024
Thursday, September 26, 2024
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
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