CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

DEPARTMENTS

Robert Christgau

A slightly disappointing month, given the status of the entrants. But I haven’t listened to so many B plusses at once in what seems like years, and that’s good. I’d hoped to come down hard on at least part of the Sire punk blockbuster before it got around me, just to prove I’m not a complete sucker for all this unmusicianly (hah!) stuff, but when I began humming Saints songs I knew that was hopeless. So instead, I found I could document my objectivity in a more constructive way, by finding good music all over the place. This month, for once, there are new albums around for every taste. At the moment my personal top-to-bottom rundown of the B plusses would go TownshendLane, Bley, Ronstadt, Steely Dan, Newman, Hell, and Robinson, but if any of these records strikes you as a good one, that’s probably the way it’ll sound.

CARLA BLEY: "Dinner Music” (Watt):: I’m quite taken with this, which reminds me in an abstract way of Another Green World. That is, whereas dance jazz was unself-consciously functional, this is art jazz that was designed to be functional—just as Eno designed his electronic pop-rock to fade into the background the way so much electronic pop-rock does, anyway. The result is yet another of those Jazz Composer’s Orchestra get togethers between avant-gardists (Roswell Rudd, Carlos Ward, and others) and pop luminaries (the Stuff studio funk axis), and this time the music meshes. Unfortunately, however, I find that only two of the eight cuts—“Ida Lupino” and “Ad Infinitum”—combine melody and rigor as magically as the double-edged concept promises. (Address: 6 West 95 Street, NYC 10025.)

B+

ALICE COOPER: "Lace and Whiskey” (Warner Bros.):: Is this how Johnny Rotten is going to end up? Concocting mildly melodic garage MOR for an audience defined by its tolerance for condescension? 1 doubt it—but I’m not so sure about Stiv Bators. C +

DEAD BOYS: ‘Young Loud and Snotty” (Sire):: Despite Stiv Bators’ mewl, which can almost get as annoying as Geddy Lee’s falsetto, this is wellcrafted junk, tough and tuneful. But the charm of good junk has always been its innocence. Naked ambition, even when it’s pathetic as this, will not do as a substitute, and neither will the spectacle of an emotional incompetent out of his depth. Alternate title (stolen from Mary Harron): Take My Life — Please. B-

RICHARD HELL AND THE VOIDOIDS: "Blank Generation” (Sire):: Like so many CBGB bands, the Voidoids make unique music from a reputedly immutable formula, With jagged, shifting rhythms accentuated by Hell’s indifference to amenities of key and timbre. I’m no great devotee of this approach, which harks back to Captain Beefheart, and which is hard to listen to for reasons more reputable than punk’s unrelenting dirty decibels. So when 1 say that Hell’s songs get through to me, that’s a compliment; I intend to save this record for those very special occasions when I feel like turning into a nervous wreck. B+ THE JOY (Fantasy):: Maybe freedom from preconceptions has enabled this group, which never achieved its proper impact to begin with, to make the best comeback LP ii> memory, but more likely it’s the quality of the competition. Because basically this is just a good Joy of Cooking album. It probably helps that Terry Garthwaite and Toni Brown now work with black studio musicians —the white ones on Cross Country did nothing for them, and neither did the hassle of maintaining a band. But this music is about sure-brained songs and an ever richer vocal interplay, just like always, and if Toni’s “You Don’t Owe Me Spring” reminds me never to forget her penchant for limpid soppiness, everything else makes clear that once a rock band defines itself as adult it need never grow old. A-

MOLKIE COLE (Janus):: Well! Who would imagine in this day and age? An eclectic English pop group whose songs recall Revolver, Mungo Jerry, and the Hello People (although that may just be the clown make up). Where do you think they might be from? Cleveland, apparently. B-

THE MOTORS (Virgin):: Good label, good name, good image, even a reference from Ducks Deluxe, but beware—this is your basic homogenized bombast. The give away is the logo. Remember the Consumer Guide Rule: Never trust a group with a logo.

C

RANDY NEWMAN: "Little Criminals” (Warner Bros.):: Always the master craftsman, Newman doesn’t waste a second here, doesn’t permit an inept lyrical insight or musical fillip. But he doesn’t seem to have written one song that ranks with his best work in three years. Among all these explorations of America’s dirty white underbelly, only the out-and-out jokes—the gross intolerance of “Short People” and the Eagle music on “Rider in the Rain”—distinguish themselves. Very disappointing. B+

THE ALAN PARSONS PROJECT: "I Robot” (Arista):: I might agree that the way this record approximates what it (supposedly) criticizes is a species of profundity if what it (supposedly) criticized was schlock. As it is, the pseudo-disco makes Giorgio Moroder sound like Eno and the pseudo-sf makes Isaac Asimov seem like a deep thinker. Back to the control board. C SMOKEY ROBINSON: "Big Time” (Tamla):: Smokey has a right to the romanticism that has saturated his solo career—deepening ick with vocal dimension has always been his metier —but I can’t get behind it. So* admiration aside, I actually like this candidly discoid soundtrack throw away more than I do A Quiet Storm, Smokey’s Family Robinson, and so forth. But it does squander much plastic. B-

SMOKEY ROBINSON: "Deep In My Heart” (Tamla):: And then there’s this, in which various Motown hacks attempt to approximate the brighter style of a less mature Smokey and come up with four songs (two of which begin each four-cut side) that actually do so. Whereupon Smokey, pro that he is, sings them as if he Wrote them himself. Nice. B+

THE ROLLING STONES: “Love You Live" (Rolling Stones):: As a Stones loyalist, I am distressed to report that this documents the Stones’ suspected deterioration as a live band, a deterioration epitomized by the accelerating affectation of Mick’s vocals. You’d think they could come up with something more than another live double-LP, wouldn’t you? C +

LINDA RONSTADT: “Simple Dreams" (Asylum):: Maybe she’s in a new phase, maybe I am, or maybe we’re both breathing easier now that Andrew Gold’s off Pursuing His Solo Career, but this is the first new Ronstadt since Heart Like A Wheel that I’ve wanted to play twice. She’s still too predictable—imagine how terse and eloquent “Blue Bayou” would seem if, instead of turning up the volume midway through, she just hit one high note at the end—but she’s also a pop r eclectic for our time, as comfortable with Mick Jagger as with Dolly Parton, interpreting Roy Orbison as easily as Buddy Holly. Even her portrayal of a junkie seeking succor from Warren Zevon’s “Carmelita” isn’t totally ridiculous. And—I admit it—she looks great in a Dodger jacket. B+

THE SAINTS: ^Tm) Stranded" (Sire):: With its intermittent hooks, droning feedback, shouted vocals, and an oldie about incest, this album from Australia achieves the great mean of punk style. Five years from now, it could sound like a classic or a naive one-shot. At the moment, it’s recommended , but only to addicts. B

STEPHEN SINCLAIR: “A Plus" (United Artists):: Wrong. D+

STEELY DAN: “Aja” (ABC):: My wife suggests that by now they realize they’ll never get out of El Lay, so they’ve elected to sing in their chains like the sea. After all, to a certain kind of reclusive aesthete, well-crafted West Coast studio jazz is as beautiful as anything else, right? Only I’m no recluse. I hated this record for quite a while before I realized that, unlike The Royal Scam, it was stretching me some, but though I still find the solo licks of Larry Carlton, Victor Feldman-, et al. too fucking tasty, at least in this context they mean something. I’m also grateful to find Fagen and Becker’s collegiate cynicism in decline; not only is “Deacon Blues” one of their strongest songs ever, it’s also one of their warmest. Now if only they’d rhymed “I cried when I wrote this song” with “Sue me if I play it wrong,” instead of “Sue me if I play too long. Preferring long to wrong could turn into their fatal flaw.

B+

STREETWALKERS: ‘Vicious

But Fair" (Mercury):: Artistically, this contingent of veterans is a casualty of punk; the stylized menace of their cultish, calibrated art-rock-cum-heavymetal has been rendered obsolete by the outgoing explosiveness of the real thing. And although I’ve always been a nominal fan of Roger Chapman, it does serve him right—that’s what you get for perfecting arrested-adolescent fantasies of decadence and sexual warfare as your hairline recedes and your pot thickens. B-

TALKING HEADS: “Talking Heads 77" (Sire):: A debut LP will often seem over-refined to habitues of a band’s local gigs, so it’s not surprising that many CBGBites felt betrayed when bits of this came out sounding like Sparks or Yes. Personally, I was even more put off by lyrics that fleshed out the Heads’ post-Jonathan Richman, so-hip-we’re-straight image; when David Byrne says “Don’t worry about the government,” the irony is that he’s not being ironic. But the more I listen, the more I believe the Heads set themselves the task of hurdling such limitations, and succeed. Like Sparks, these are spoiled kids, but without the callowness or adolescent misogyny; like Yes, they are wimps, but without vagueness or cheap romanticism. Every tinkling harmony is righted with a screech, every self-help homily contextualized dramatically, so that in the end the record proves not only that the detachment of craft can coexist with a frightening intensity of feeling—something most artists know—but that the most inarticulate rage can be rationalized. Which means they’re punks after all. A-

TOPAZ (Columbia):: In which Rob Stoner proves his virtuosity by mixing arrogance, cynicism, and stupidity on one record, and Billy Cross comes up with Jasper Hutchinson, who can both whine and caterwaul in a mid-Atlantic Southwestern accent. D +

PETE TOWNSHEND-RONNIE LANE: “Rough Mix" (MCA):: Meher Baba must have been all reet if he inspired psalmody so plain and sharply observed. Three of Townshend’s contributions—“Keep Me Turning,” “Misunderstood,” and an unlikely song of adoration called “My Baby Gives It Away”—are his keenest in years, and while Lane’s evocations of the passing scene are more poignant on his Island import, One For The Road, “Annie” is a suitably modest folk classic. Together, the two disciples prove that charity needn’t be sentimental, detachment cold, nor peace boring. Selah. B+