CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

CHRISTGOU CONSUMER GUIDG

DEPARTMENTS

by Robert Christgau

JOAN ARMATRADING: "To The Limit" (A&M):: The secret of Armatrading's songs is their plainness, but it's also their drawback. When she hits an image—"I read your letter yesterday/It fell between the covers/And my bare skin"—she lights up a real life. More often, though, she just says what she has to say with whatever unprepossessing idiom is at hand, and her melodies are even less inclined to witticism than her words. This style of candor, engaging in theory, escapes tedium in practice by way of Armatrading's bluntly dramatic singing. Rarely have less tuneful songs so impressed themselves on my mind.

B +

BIG STAR: "Third" (PVC):: In late 1974 Alex Chilton—who had already evolved from America's answer to Stevie Winwood into the inventor of self-conscious power pop—transmogrified himself into some hybrid of Loy Reed (circa The Velvet Underground and/or Berlin) and Michael Brown (circa "Walk Away, Renee" and "Pretty Ballerina"). This is the album that resulted—14 songs in all, only two or three of which wander off into the psychotic ward. Halting, depressive, eccentrically shaped, it will seem completely beyond the pale to those who already find his regular stuff weird. I think it's prophetically idiosyncratic and chillingly lyrical. (Available from PVC Records, Box 362, So. Plainfield, Nj 07080.)

A-

HANK COCHRAN: "With A Little Help From My Friends" (Capitol):: Another eccentric Nashville songwriter rides after gold with some famous buddies and winds up with another better-than-average country album. This one features Merle Haggard (two songs), Willie Whozit (one song), Jack Greene (who sounds like Waylon Whozit), and a dusky-voiced old favorite of mine, Jeannie Seely (Jack's singing partner 'and Hank's wife). Clinkerless, but way too heavy on the light-hearted throwaways.

B

ELVIS COSTELLO: "Armed Forces" (Columbia):: Like his predecessor, Bob Dylan, this ambitious tunesmith offers more as a phrasemaker than as an analyst or a poet, more as a public image than as a thinking, feeling person. He needs words because they add color and detail to his music. I like the more explicitly sociopolitical tenor here— "the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and The Times" evokes the conscripts in Her Majesty's Senior,. Service more directly than any lover' he's inclined to pick on. But! don't find as many memorable bits of language as I did on This Year's Mod$l. And though I approve of the more intricate pop constructions of the music, I found TYMs relentless nastiness of instrumental and (especially) vocal attack more compelling. A good.record, to be sure, but not a great one.

A-

THE DODGERS: "Love On The Rebound" (Polydor):: These California-dreaming Englishmen play it straight and tight enough to establish their professionalism and even bore people a little. More lively than Beatlemania, that's for surfe, but these days you can't win the big ones with the same old plays.

C +

FIREFALL: "Elan" (Atlantic):: I do too pay attention to mainstream rock product; in fact, I listened to this five or six times without a trace of stomach upset. The group achieves more of that old CSN(Y) feel than any of the decade's country-rock spinoffs; the album achieves more of that old rock 'n' roll feel than any of the decade's CSN(Y) records. Commendable if not quite recommendable—didn't think they had it in them.

B-

TOMMY -FLANAGAN: "Something Borrowed, Something Blue" (Galaxy):: Decorative flourishes and all, Flanagan's cocktail piano is as intelligent as easy-listening music ever gets—bebop as a received style. I prefer this to the classic Flanagan trio record— Eclypso, on Inner City—because I t prefer the tunes (especially Monk's | "Friday The 13th"). Also because the * less auspicious rhythm section—Smith ! (Jimmie) ain't Jones (Elvin)— merits £ fewer solos and breaks. And despite— tsk, tsk—the electric piano on the title cut.

B +

TERRY GARTH WAITE: "Hand In Glove" (Fantasy):: I complained about production clutter on her now-deleted Arista album, but I must admit that David Rubinson injected a brightness that I miss in El Lay jazzman John Guerin's more tasteful work here. That could even be why the songs seem a shade duller this time. But Garthwaite's rhythmic and timbral adeptness remain unique in rock, and I'm grateful these days for any explicitly feminist analysis that is both heterosexual and anltipuritanical. Anyway, the songs are still a lot brighter than most.

B +

DAN HARTMAN: "Instant Replay" (Blue Sky):: Too bad one of the few dispo albums that out-dollar-fordollars the corresponding disco single is this super-efficient piece of rock funk, but deserving souls who dally with mechanization can't complain when bested by a real machine. Sole monkey wrench: the slow one, "Time And Space," on which Hartman breaks his own rule by trying to write a meaningful lyric and then triples the misdemeanor by running it through his own larynx. Who does he think he is, Robert Plant? Machines can't sing.

B +

TONIO K.: "Life In The Foodchain" (Full Moon/Epic):: Tonio shouts numerous humorous words— his evolution jokes are funnier than Devo's—over the noise made by crack El Lay session men as they revisit Highway 61 at 110 miles an'hour. Personal to Warren Zevon: note new speed limit. Inspirational Verse: "Yes I wish I was as mellow/As for instance Jackson Browne/But 'Fountain of Sorrow' my ass motherfucker/I hope you wind up in the ground."

B +

MOON MARTIN: "Shots From A Cold Nightmare" (Capitol):: Hook fiends will love these 10 catchy little numbers, but me, I'm put off by Martin's pop drawl—"tender" or "excited," he's dispassionate in a way that doesn't suit his musical or lyrical directness. Or maybe it's just that eight songs about treacherous girls are four or five too many.

B

MUSIQUE: "Keep On Jumpin' " (Prelude):: Just to reassure anyone pinheaded enough to suspect that I've gone over to The Enemy, I thought I'd mention this disco cult item from 1978, one of those tragedies of amyl nitrate poisoning that so distress sympathetic observers like myself. To start with the worst, half the record is devoted to a stupefying pop melody y-elept "Summer Love" for 6:17 bn side one and "Summer Love Theme" for 8:00 on Side two. By comparison, the serviceable dance mix of the title cut shines, and the remaining track would be brilliant music in any company: 8:20 of spare polyrhythm that* never stops jumpin' and might be mistaken for the Wild Magnolias in the age of mechanical reproduction except that it's faster. The problem is the title, which not surprisingly dominates the lyric. I grant that ("Push, push") "In The Bush" is a phrase that sticks in the mind, but so is "Sit on my face." lean imagine dancing tb either in the heat of the 8:20. But would we hav6 anything to sby over coffee the next morning?

C

PETER, PAUL & MARY: "Reunion" (Warner Bros.):: To turn "Forever Young" intb the post-hippie "My Way," the way Dylan does, just means you've become a showbiz reprobate. To turn it into a rinky-dink reggae like these three geezers do means you've been middle-aged and liberal since you were 15.

D +

SISTER SLEDGE: "We Are Family" (Cotillion):: The disco disc features identical versions (at 8:06 and 6:04)-of the two side-openers—the title track, a magnificent, soul-shouting sisterhood anthem that might conceivably set C.Y.O. girls and radical feminists dancing side by side, and "He's The Greatest Dancer," a depressingly straight-faced (though seductive) tribute to a fellow who doffs his designer clothes for a different woman every night. (I wonder if I would ha,ve been so amused by the boy from New York City in 1965 if I'd known that in 1979 he wouldn't be just an adolescent fantasy any more.) If you buy the album, you get "Lost In Music," that one-in-ahundred-I-love-you-know-what song that illuminates its subject. Plus a couple of useless slow ones and some chic riffs. So I guess the d.d. is your option.

B

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD: "Living Without Your Love" (United Artists):: Fledgling producer David Wolfert doesn't get her voice as subtly as Roy Thomas Baker (or Jerry Wexler) did, but he gives her more good songs than she's had in a decade. Also more good sides: one, featuring a "You've Really Got A Hold On Me" that vies with Smokey's, and "Closet Man," which is about what you hope it's about and very nice indeed.

B +

ROD STEWART: "Blondes Have More Fun" (Warner Bros.):: He used to mean to be meaningful and now he means to be trashy, but that doesn't make him decadent. Decadent is when Carole Bayer Sager writes all your songs for you.

B

SYLVESTER: "Step II" (Fantasy):: Side one is fine dance montage: make and remake of a surging new-soul classic (available on disco disc) surround something you can shake your ass to for 5:50 and then forget forever at 5:55. Side two proves that Sylvester cannot impersonate Cissy Houston or Russell Thomkins.

B-

TIPICA IDEAL: "Out Of This World" (Coco):: Although I'm told this is an excellent charanga record, I can't swear it's true, because I don't remember ever listening to another. But I know this is the first salsa album I've ever played—and I dutifully put on every pne I get—that I turned over as soon as the first side was through. I like its directness—for me, the jazz admixture in most fealsa distracts from its basic rhythmic thrust. I also like the way the timbales explode against the steady fiddle line. I even like the flutes.

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A-

"WORKING" (Columbia):: Broadway is as obsessed with leisure as any other pop bastion, and I have no doubt that one reason this show failed was its subject, which it does justice at least half the time. The best lyrics describe a character's own peculiar job, gather than generalizing about his or her line of work: whether it's the luck of the draw, the state of the art, or the moral superiority of wbmen, the actresses have more touching stories to tell than the actors. All the songs flirt with sentimentality, whi^h means the good opes can make you cry. Worth preserving.

B +

THE YANKEES: "High 'n' Inside" (Big Sound):: Xhese New Yorkers play it fast and loose enough to dismay pop technicians and even offend people a little. Indeed, I was already hooked on their boisterous ~ Strangeloves/Standells tribute when it struck me that maybe Jon Tiven's wandering pitch, which I find cute, meant the record was warped. It's moje likely, though, that his voice has begun to change, inspiring him to cover "Bad Boy" (well) and write (a good) one called "Take It Like A Man." A hit that proves once again that rock 'n' roll is about having the spirit, knowing the tricks, and taking the risks. Ivan Julian is DH. (Available from Big Sound Records, Box 520, New York, NY 10012.)

A-

Reprint courtesy of Village Voice.