In celebration of X having a new album out (their farewell?)
I must say I agree with Barney here.
To me they have one, maybe two, good songs - "Nausea" and "Los Angeles". But really only "Nausea" would I ever actively crave to hear.
They file into a category (future blogpost maybe) I call "See It, Don't Feel It"
Although, to be honest, I don't really see it either, as on-paper pitch to potential listeners
Voices that were never meant to sing, but that don't fit the category of "best bad singer" (Alice Cooper, Jennifer Herrema),... just insufficient, ill-advised, not built for purpose... consequently strained to put it mildly.
Guitar that is not all that (all that twangy "rock and roll"-ness).
Drumming, ditto.
I guess that just leaves the words, then.
The poet-as-rocker fallacy.
I was so disappointed by X. I first encountered them through their cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’s Breathless, played over the end credits of a film that is itself a cover: Jim McBride’s Breathless with Richard Gere and Valerie Kaprisky, his remake of Godard’s A Bout de Souffle. I loved the movie, and the song gained a glamorous sheen by association. So then when I found it was by a cool LA punk bad with a cool name, I was excited to find out more about them. And as Barney Hoskyns says, their album covers and song titles were terrific. But then when I listened to them…
ReplyDeleteThe first album I heard was More Fun in the New World, the follow-up to Under the Big Black Sun, and I don’t think even their fans would claim it is a classic: it has all the faults of the earlier albums, while being totally drained of all energy, apparently in a bid for mainstream commercial appeal.
So I largely gave up on them after that, but as far as I could tell the succeeding albums got progressively worse. The only one I ended up owning was Los Angeles, on cassette, and I am pleased to see others agreeing that it is their most bearable outing.
They are still going - or at least they were until recently - although age is clearly catching up with them. When last seen, Exene Cervenka had become a Trumper conspiracy theorist.
X is still a great name for a band, though.
They are a great case study for a topic that always fascinates me: the balance between musical and non-musical aspects of an artist's appeal.
DeleteOn the four-quadrant plot with musical quality on the x-axis and non-musical quality on the y-axis, X are right at the extreme of the top left quadrant. With Black Sabbath maybe at the extreme of the bottom right: fantastic music, terrible visuals, song titles, etc. Who is at the top of the top right? Kraftwerk. Public Enemy. Roxy Music.
One more thought on X. I enjoyed Joe Carducci’s withering put down after quoting some critic’s enthusiastic gush over the importance of the Does’ marriage to their music: “I hear the divorce was amicable”
DeleteOK just one more... The other thing that got me excited about X was hearing that they had worked with Ray Manzarek and covered Soul Kitchen. He appears on Los Angeles a few times, conjuring a menacing trudge on Nausea and some eerie atmospherics on The Unheard Music. They should have let him play more, clearly.
DeleteThey seem a nice bunch from the clip in Decline and Fall of Western Civilization.
ReplyDeleteManzarek hookup a big clue to their poet-as-rocker / rocker-as-poet aspirations
I've met them a few times and first in 1980 when my best buddy was friends with John and Exene. There are a lot of good songs in their repertoire, maybe they're more American than could be tolerated by the NME. Favorite is Johnny Hit and Run Pauline. Hungry Wolf is good, frankly like Big Black Sun better than Los Angeles. That review is cruel.
ReplyDeleteStrong disagree here. Hoskyns is one of those guys who sometimes, to me, just always seemed to have a stick up his ass (I strongly detested his book on The Band). X are a great band. Even kind of underrated tbh! I've seen them live at least 3x and plan on seeing them on this final tour and they've never put on a bad show. Their "harmonies" work for me personally. I am pro-poet as rocker generally although Patti Smith and Richard Hell have never been my thing so I get the indifference.
ReplyDelete