CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

by

Robert Christgau

AIR: “Air Lore” (Arista Novus):: Demonstrating not only that ragtime (Scott Joplin) and New Orleans (Jelly Roll Morton) are Great Art consonant with Contemporary Jazz, but also that they’re Corny. And that both Great Art and Com can be fun. Which is why the somewhat stiff, if not comy, readings of the themes, especially “King Porter Stomp,” don’t get in the way, Although just what could get in the way of Henry Threadgill improvising over an explicit pulse for a whole album I can’t imagine.

A

JAMES BLOOD: “Tales off Captain Black” (Artists House):: This isn’t the great Blood Ulmer record I’ve been waiting for. How can it be, when the saxophone player is Ornette Coleman, who makes everything he plays his own? And how can it be, when the drummer is Denardo Coleman, who can’t follow Blood in free time or on the one? But it does offer the densest guitar improvisations anyone has put on record since Hendrix, and over catchy themes, too. And it does offer Ornette Coleman.

A*

THE BOOMTOWN RATS: “The Fine Art Off Surfacing” (Columbia):: Bob Geldof has a journalist’s gift—he’d make a terrific topical songwriter if only he believed in something. Instead, he’s taken to dramatizing the usual alienation from the usual inside. Too bad.

B-

LONNIE BROOKS: “Bayou Lightning” (Alligator):: A thoughtful guitarist, intermittently clever composer, and competent shouter, Brooks deserves to be recorded by someone as good as Bruce Iglauer. But that doesn’t mean anyone who cares less about blues than they do should buy the result.

B-

ROSANNE CASH: “Right Or Wrong” (Columbia):: Except for Bonnie Raitt, this is as good as the female-interpretive genre got in 1979: Cash is cool, and feisty, and Rodney Crowell and Keith Sykes both find nice twists in the pains of love. But the sessionmen sound so dead they have to be trying. Is this some weird kind of El-Lay-goes-Nashville statement? Or just the end of an era?

B

CHIC: “Risquk” (Atlantic):: Edwards and Rodgers proved on Sister Sledge’s “Lost In Music” that hedonism and its discontents, the inevitable focus of diseo’s meaningfulness moves, is a subject worth opening up. Here, “Good Times” and “My Feet Keep Dancing” surround the sweetly romantic “Warm Summer Night” in a rueful celebration of escape that’s all the more suggestive for its unquenchable good cheer. Side two’s exploration of romance and its agonies also has a fatalistic tint, but in the end the asides and rhythmic shifts (as well as the lyrics themselves) give rue the edge over celebration. Subtle, intricate, kinetic, light but not mindless— in short, good to dance to.

A*

THE CLASH: “London Calling* (Epic):: Here’s where they start showing off. If “Lost in the Supermarket,” for instance, b just another alienated-consumption song, it leaps instantly to the head of the genre on the empathy of Mick Jones’s vocal. And so it goes. Complaints about “slick” production are absurd—Guy Stevens slick?—and insofar as the purity pf the guitar attack is impinged upon by brass, pianner, and shuffle, thb is an expansion, not a comprombe. A gratifyingly loose Joe Strummer makes virtuoso use of hb four-note range, and Paul Simonon has obviously been studying hb reggae records. Warm, angry, and thoughtful, confident, melodic, and hard-rocking, ‘his b the best double LP since Exile On Main Street. And it’s selling for about $7.50.

A +

CULTURE: * International Herb” (Virgin International):: The tunes are .so cute and uncomplicated and the lyrics so basic that it’s Almost as if the Chi-Lites, say, had decided to sing about herb and dread instead of love and marriage. Only you never heard Eugene Record wail the way Joseph Hill does a few times on side two—probably because Record never wept about slavery in public.

A-

DR. BUZZARD’S ORIGINAL SAVANNAH BAND: “James Monroe H.S. Presents Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band Goes to Washington” (Elektra):: Acclimated after three-and-a-half years, I find the music easy to love even though it’s more exotic than ever—immersed in the Latin accents of 40’s (and 50’s) dance music, blissfully indifferent to current disco formulas. And for aD the charm of Cory Daye’s solo bid with Sandy Linzer, her wit and grace—that is, her chance to be remembered as the finest female vocalist to emerge in the 70’s—is showcased more precisely by August Darnell's words and Stoney Brower’s music. 1 only wish I knew what the lyrics meant sometimes (Especially that one about the neo-Nazi). A little clarity, rather than the indulgently atmospheric Hollywood romanticism Darnell strives for, might make up for the absence of floor hits.

A-

EDDY GRANT: “Walking On Sunshine” (Epic):: A Guyanese producer and one-man 0 band, Grant gets an almost calypsonian, steelf drum feel out of his synthesizer, as well as some £§ nice orchestral stuff. The first side is dancey and | more. But the second side is thrown away. And the lyrics are quite uncalypsonian.

B-

THE JIMMY JOHNSON BAND: “John| son’s Whacks” (Delmark):: Syl’s cousin performed better on Alligator’s Living Chicago Blues Volume I, but only marginaBy, and he compensates by showing unexpected chops as a writer. Whether hoping to make the coyer of Living Blues magazine or complaining that women aren’t loyal any moreu he comes across as a bold-faced contemporary. But his basic wail starts to sound thin after a while, his band is only solid, and his guitar can’t carry the extra load.

B +

LINTON KWESI JOHNSON: “Foicss of Victoiy” (Mango):: You have every right to be suspicious of a Jamaican-English intellectual who writes message poems in patois and then sing-speaks them with the support of top reggae professionals. But you’re wrong. Politics aside, Johnson has fresh musical gifts—an inside-outside awareness of the inherent music ality of Caribbean English and a rhythmic touch as uncanny as his band’s—and on this album they’re enhanced by insinuating horn charts, even melodies. While some prefer his debut, the bloody Dread Beat an’ Blood (Virgin Front Line import), for striking closer to the broken bone of British racism, I actually like the abstractions here better, especially on “Reality Poem.” Abo, it’s a relief to encounter a reggae album that doesn’t once refer to Jah.

A*

THE KINKS: “Low Budget” (Arista):: Ray Davies hasn’t rocked so hard since hb powerchord days in the mid-60’s, and often he shores up sloppy burlesques like the title cut just by trying harder. But 1 don’t find hb poor-mouthing crassness—the fusion of syndrum and machoflash guitar on “Superman” or the schlock hooks from “Jumping Jack Flash” and “Jesus Christ Superstar”—at all chanfling, and anyone who detects irony in “Catch Me I’m Falling,” hb threnody for “Captain America," is too worried about the ayatollah or the Russkies to think straight. With hb ceaseless whining about strikes and shortages, the plight of millionaires and the cruelty of prostitutes, Davies has turned into the voice of the middle-class ressentiment he’s always been a sucker for. No, Ray, you don’t have to be a superman just to “survive.” Especially if you’ve got a song catalogue.

B-

BOB MARLEY & THE WAILERS: “Survival” (Island):: It’s great in theory that Marley is once again singing about oppression rather than escape, but in practice the album’s most powerful political statement is the diagram of the slave ship on the cover and inner sleeve. There’s a world of difference between songs of experience like “No Woman No Cry” and songs of generalization like / “So Much Trouble.” And it’s a difference that Marley and his musicians are too damn sophisticated to make the most of.

B

THE POUCE: “Reggatta dc Blanc” (A&M):: The idea is to fuse Sting’s ringing rock voice and the trio’s aggressive, hard-edged rock attack with a less eccentric version of reggae’s groove and a saner version of reggae’s mix. To me this sounds half-assed. And though I suppose I might find the “synthesis” innovative if I heard as much reggae as they do in England, it’s more likely I’d find it infuriating.

B-

IGGY POP: “New Values” (Arista):: This album provides what it advertises only to those who consider Iggy a font of natural wisdom— there are such people, you know. But it does get at least partway over on the strength of a first side that has the casual, hard-assed, funny feel of a good blues session—except that it rocks harder, which ain’t bad.

B +

THE SLITS: “Cut” (Antilles):: For once a white reggae style that rivals its models for weirdness and formal imagination. The choppy lyrics and playful, quavering, chantlike vocals are a tribute to reggae’s inspired amateurism rather than an entertaining facsimile, and the spacey rhythms and recording techniques are exploited to solve the great problem of female rock bands, which is how to make yourself heard over all that noise. Ari Up’s answer is to sing around it, which is lucky, because she’d be screeching for sure on top of the usual wall of chords. Some of .this is thinner and more halting than it’s meant to be, but I sure hope they keep at it.

B +

STEEL PULSE: “Tribute to the Martyrs” (Mango):: I can’t tell whether the relatively clearheaded politics of these English Jamaicans detract from their ejaculatory, off-center music or make it sound more avant-garde than it is. Both, probably. If their Steve Biko song isn’t as affecting as Tom Paxton’s, their George Jackson song beats Dylan’s, andl can’t imagine anyone else, not even Tom Robinson, making a hook out of “rock against racism.” One of their secrets, as you might have guessed, is a terrific beat. Another is forthright singing of a sort that—and now I’m guessing—can only grow out of unshakable conviction. —

A-

PETER TOSH: “Mystic Man” (Rolling Stones):: Mysticism should keep its own counsel; boast about it, translate your supposed experience of the ineffable into any but the most simple-minded idealogy, and95 times out of 100 you’ll sound like a smug asshole. Tosh’s ever more preachy vocal stance does nothing for his dopey puns (“shitty” for “city,” far out), his confused political-economic theories, or his equation of hamburgers with heroin. And his musicians sound like the bored pros good rockers so often turn into.

C +

20 /20 (Portrait):: Just about all of these dense, cleverly constructed tunes would sound great on the radios 1^ they have some other reason for being, though, neither lyrics nor vocals—which seem to avoid both banality and its opposite as a simple matter of power-pop taste—let on what it is. When CBS breaks a few hits-off this we’ll remember it as a classic. But CBS won’t.

B 4*

Reprint courtesy The Village Voice