CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

by

Robert Christgau

ARTFUL DODGER: "Babes On Broadway" (Columbia):: Okay, two nice albums of power pop go virtually unnoticed, so you up the power, especially since you're running out of the cute tunes 'n' tricks that provide the pop. But then it isn't power pop any more—sounds almost like Angel, or Queen. Sounds pretty desperate, too. C +

STEPHEN BISHOP: "Careless" (ABC):: Bishop ain't bad for a pop singer-songwriter—his voice is threequarters Simon and one-quarter Garfunkel and he's got as many brains and few6r pretensions than either. He commits no sins. Omits quite a few, though—even boasts that he's outgrown material like "I Feel So Miserable Without You, It's Almost Like Having You Here." Gee, remember pretensions? C +

DR. BUZZARD'S ORIGINAL SAVANNAH BAND: "Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band Meets King Penett" (RCA):: A brilliant dud. Some of the lyrics read like Ishmael Reed—soft Ishmael Reed— but for all its skillful synthesis, the music just doesn't kick in. Of course, that's kind of what I said about their debut, which I now love. People danced to that one, though. B

"FOTOMAKER" (Atlantic):: In which the label that has already brought us Firefall, Festival, Foreigner, Funkpot, Fishwife, Failure and Fuckall sponsors yet another dupergroup made up of yet another batch of craft-obsessed rock dues-payers. Unfortunately, this one is faceless even by low-profile dupergroup standards. (Say, there's a name for a band—Faceless.) After all, Firefall did blend second-line graduates of Spirit and the Flying Burrito Brothers into their distinctively unexciting rock country-pop. And Fuckall did fuse second-line graduates of Chelsea and the Harlots of 42nd Street into their harmlessly obscenerockpunk-pop. But second-line graduates of the Rascals and the Raspberries make only for depressingly mediocre rock abcxyzpop. This is formally appropriate—titles like "Where Have You Been All My Life?" and "Two Can Make It Work"

would be altogether overwhelmed by hooks, melodies, or singing of the slightest originality or'enthusiasm. Beat the rush—boycott now, before anyone has even heard of them. D +

"THE GODZ" (Millennium):: "We're everything your parents ever warned you about," they warn. "We can't feel nothin',"got no heart or soul," they boast. "The Godz are rock an^ roll machines," they admit. Talk about your throwbacks—these evolutionary mishaps are funnier than Blue Oyster Cult, and they're not trying. Don Brewer produced. C +

STEVE GOODMAN: "Say It In Private** (Asylum):: If a smart journeyman like Goodman were consistently great, he'd be a genius, not a smart journeyman, and on one side the songs just don't command interest. But side two is a tiny folkie tpur de force, dryly reworking genre expectations so that we mourn Mayor Daley, sort of, and know that Goodman's father is dead for real. B

RUPERT HOLMES: "Pursuit off Happiness" (Private Stock):: Rupert remembers pretensions. As a muchcovered pop singer-songwriter who narrated well-crafted musical soap operas, he earned neither popular nor critical acclaim. So now h.e's pursued fame by moving to an avowed singles label, jettisoning the narrative and steering between Jimmy Webb literacy at his best ("Less Is More") and Paul Williams pap at his worst ("Speechless"). Will he become a household hook? Will he remember pretension? C BILLY JOEL: "The Stranger'* (Columbia):: Billy remembers pretensions, too. Having hidden his egotism

in metaphor as a young songpoet, he achieved success only when he uncloseted the spoiled brat behind those bulging eyes. But here the brat appears only once, in the nominally metaphorical guise of "the stranger." The rest of Billy has more or less grown up. He's now as likeable as your once-rebellious and still-tolerant uncle who has the quirk of believing that OPEC was designed to ruin his air-conditioning business. And despiteJheChapinesque turns his voice takes when he tries to get raucous, he now makes a better Elton John than Leo Sayer does. B-

DENNIS LINDE: "Under The Eye" (Monument):: If Linde showed a shred of vocal or instrumental personality, this studio rockabilly put-together might be the catchy sleeper of the year. As it is, control-board adepts will no doubt find his triple-filtered singing and multi-tracked musicianship appropriate to his occasionally spacey themes. And I'Jl just reply that if either side lived up to its first two songs, I wouldn't be niggling. B +

BAT MCGRATH: "The Spy" (Amherst):: Although he's a nice singer, McGrath is bound in by the mildly jazzy conventions of contemporary folk music. He's nothing special as a melodist, and works on record to standard folk-rock "backup." But, like he says, "Naples ain't just pretty, it's my home," and he's got some eye. His songs say more about how it is for all those formerly young guys with beards who chose to live in the country back around 1970 than all the paens to homemade bread coming out of Vermont, Colorado and Marin. This is as solid as his first, From The Blue Eagle; I'm grading it lower to register my musical qualms. But anyone who could use a song or two should pick up on this guy. B

PERE UBU: "The Modern Dance" (Blank):: Ubu's music is nowhere near as willful as it sounds at first. Riffs emerge from the cacophony, David Thomas' shrieking suits the heterodox passion of the lyrics, and the synthesizer noise begins to cohere after a while. So even though there's too much Radio Ethiopia and not enough Redondo Beach, I'll be listening through the failed stuff—the highs are worth it. B +

IGGY POP AND JAMES WILLIAMSON: "Kill City" (Bomp):: Unlike the first three Stooges' albums, this collection of doctored tapes from 1975 is never brought to a halt by some luded-out threnody. But it doesn't offer any necessities of life, either—no "I Wanna Be Your Dog" or "Search And Destroy," not even a "Gimme Some Skin" or "Here Comes Success" or "China Girl. " Plus it sounds sliidgey. B

"THE REAL KIDS" (Red Star):: These fellas worry about people thinking they're "fags"—honest, they admit it—so they reject punky posing for wholesome pro-girl rock 'n' roll, including a few good songs ("All Kindsa Girls," "Just Like Darts") and many banalities. See Rick Danko. B-

"SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER" (RSO):: So you've seen the movie— pretty good movie, right?—and decided that this is the disco album you're going to try. Well, I can't blame you. The Bee Gees side is pop music at a new peak of irresistible silliness, with the former Beatle clones singing like mechanical mice with an unnatural sense of rhythm. And the album climaxes on a par-tee even nondiscoids can get into, beginning with the best of David Shire's "additional music," then switching almost imperceptibly , to something tolerable by MFSB and revving into all 10:52 of the Trammps' magnificent "Disco Inferno." But I find the other two sides unlistenable, mostly because the rest of Shire's additions are real soundtrack-quality stuff—he even discofies Mussorgsky without making a joke of it (compare Walter Murphy on side two). And there's one more problem. While you're deciding to buy this record, so is everyone you know. You're gonna get real sick of it. Maybe you should Surprise Your Friends and seek out Casablanca's Get Down And Boogie instead. B +

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD: "It Begins Again" . (United Artists):: Roy Thomas Baker has encouraged Dusty's breathiness and then had the good manners not to suffocate it in the orchestral mix, and I'm grateful. I could listen to her sing .tracking charts when she exhales that way, and this album, her first In five years, made me stop what I was doing more than once. But the sad truth is that Baker has given her only two or three strong ballads: the flukey treasures from Chi Coltrane and Barry Manilow that open each side, plus maybe Lesley 'Gore and Ellen Weston's "Love Me By Name." And so the fast numbers, never her forte, sound like filler. Next time, Baker should look beyond the pop pros for material like,,say, "Small Town Talk," "Makin' Love Don't Always Make Love Grow," "I Can't Stand The Rain." And he should make sure there's a next time. B

"TUFF DARTS" (Sire):: Maybe Robert Gordon left this band to escape resident sickie John DeSalvo, one of those guys who deserves to get fixed by the knife-wielding lesbians' he has nightmares about. The only way to make their record more depressing would be to add a hologram of Gordon's replacement, Tommy Frenzy, whose slick blond hair and metal teeth now set the band's android-delinquent "image." Then again, you could takeaway Jeff Salen's guitar. C

MUDDY WATERS: "Fan Ready" (Blue Sky):: Not as ready as you were last time, Mud, but don't let it worry you—it's always harder to get hard again again. B +

WIRE: "Pink Flag" (Harvest):: The simultaneous rawness and detachment of this debut LP returns rock 'n' roll irony to the (native) land of Mick Jagger, where it belongs. From a formal strategy almost identical to the Ramones', this band deducts most melody to arrive at music much grimmer and more frightening; Wire would sooner revamp "The Fat Lady Of Limbourg" and "Some Kinda Love" than "Let's Dance" or "Surfin' Bird." Not that any of the 21 titles here has been heard before—that would ruin the overall effect of a punk suite comprising parts so singular that you can hardly imagine them in some other order. Inspirational Prose: "This is your correspondent, running out of tape, gunfire's increasing, looting, burning, rape."