BUGLE CALL DUB

RECORDS

Jeff Nesin

BUGLE CALL DUB

THE CLASH

Sandinista!

(Epic)

The Clash are emphatic. Any statement that can be made with the point of a finger is made with a fist raised in the air. They believe in bulk: the three-disc Sandinsta!, where the wind does not come sweeping down the plain, nearly doubles the number of tracks on London Calling (36 to 19), and could with no difficulty be compressed onto one LP and a NuDisk.

The Clash are not particularly strong on verbal skills. Their lyrics have precious little colloquial grace (try singing 'indiscriminate use of the power of arrest' without cracking up), and as for vocal diction, well, I walked around for days hearing 'Wrong 'Em Boyo' from the last album as a story about Stagger Lee being served the incorrect entree at a Spanish restaurant with the chorus going, 'Don't you know it is wrong/it is arroz con polio.'

Who cares? One can go the rest of one's life without deciphering the words to 'Clash City Rockers' and still recognize that the Clash are (most of the time) a rousingly terrific band with anger rushing through their blood, and with an admirable lack of concern for the compromises that might earn them a wide constitutency. The Clash are stubborn, and to ask them to lighten up is to miss the point.

Not since, what?, Some Time In New York Cify? Power In The Darkness?, has there been a rock album so unrelenting in its political specificity and stridency. Is there no human malfeasance that fails to prompt The Clash to pick up guitar and pen? Sandinista! outlines positions on record industry expense accounts, U.S. military intervention in Cuba and Chile, the N.Y.C. transit strike, draft registration, slum conditions, sexual corruption in government, Coca-Cola (again! Does Joe Strummer own Pepsi stock?) the color deterioration of motion picture prints (oops, sorry, they passed on that one)...

This issue-oriented rock is certainly preferable to, say, the idiotic self-absorption of a Billy 'You can speak your mind/But not on my time' Joel (whose 'My Life' has found the home it rightfully deserves as the theme of ABC's smut-com Bosom Buddies), or worrying about the color of the M&M's in the backstage dressing room. The Reagan years will demand more ideological thoughtfulness than has been the norm recently; opportunities for outrage will be many. And outrage is The Clash's middle name, buster.

Being opinionated, fighting political battles on aesthetic turf, is just fine, so long as you don't feel you're being harangued by a gang of rock Paddy Chayefskys blustering their way through an indiscriminate list grievances. the Clash stray from their great theme, The Dying of England, the more specious and patronizing their songs become. And since they've abandoned their barrage-of-noise rock 'n' roll approach for a sparer style based on various black sources—reggae, dub, The Supremes, Kurtis Blow, gospel, bop— the jive comes closer to the surface. (What with The Police, Talking Heads, PiL, Blondie, etc., all appropriating stylistic moves from domestic R&B and the Third World, rock hasn't been this eager to cross racial lines since the days of dagger's Slim Harpo impersonations and Eric Burdon's obeisance to John Lee Hooker.)

After side one, which punches out the dialectical rap of 'The Magnificent Seven' ('Socrates and Milhous Nixon/Both went the same way: through the kitchen'); 'Hitsville U.K.,' (a hummable ditty that celebrates rock independents to the beat of 'You Can't Hurry Love'), the reggae 'Junco Partner,' and three other bracingly performed furies ('Ivan Meets G.I. Joe,' 'The Leader' and 'Something About England'), it's hunt-and-peck for the goods on Sandinista! Eddy Grant's 'Police On My Back,' 'Up in Heaven (Not Only Here)' and 'Somebody Got Murdered' come closest to the slambang Clash of triumphs past; 'The Sound Of The Sinners' is a clever spiritual that would have been a natural for Elvis Presley; and two oddities, Timon Dogg's vocal on his own 'Lose This Skin' and Mickey Gallagher's kids singing 'Career Opportunities,' break up the drudgery of album three, where the dub threatens to go on forever.

If the rock audience should lose its heart to Sandinista!, if The Clash's manifesto waltz clicks in a big way, imagine the possibilities, the polarity conceivable in the arena of topical-rock: the Doobie Brothers write tunes supporting condo conversion, The Ramones come out in favor of the Tri-Lateral Commission, Springsteen decries Papal edicts on birth control...The Clash, along with everything else they are, could be the cavalry of protest, and Sandinista! their bloated call to battle.

SHOES

Tongue Twister

It was in 1977, The Year of the Anti-Christ, that Shoes released their official debut, Black Vinvl Shoes, on their own private label. In its original form, this amateurish album remains as elusive as Big Star's Third. Yet it merely whimpered on the sidelines in the same year as the Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks—and never have two worlds been farther apart.

The chasm separating the Sex Pistols and Shoes, their first albums, and their audiences is significant, for it's the gap that continues to divide rock groups within the framework of the meaningless demarcation, 'New Wave.' In a sense, it is the wound in a culture that may never heal (self-righteous product vs. punk's self-righteousness). Clearly, in terms of the mass consensus, bands like Shoes have won handsdown.

There's no -shamefulness to this fact (although, for some, it may be hard to swallow); it simply must be understood within the context of a homogeneous movement, within the confines of repression. As Greil Marcus has astutely written, 'The secret message behind the election of November 4th was that some people belong in this country, and some people don't.' If indeed there is a return to normalcy in America, then Shoes is as good a band as any to mark such a cultural transition.

Theirs is a remarkable achievement—a polished plateau of sound where every new record seems as wholesome as the previous one. On Tongue Twister, Shoes' third, their music has become full-blown and more expansive; there are no jumbled nerves as on Black Vinyl or hectic rhythms as on Present Tense. In fact, on all twelve cuts (all approximately three minutes), there's not one second of hesitation, as if to do so would confirm what must remain hidden: the band's persistent state of adolescence.

After all, what fundamentally may be so appealing about these four young men's music is that Gary Klebe, Jeff and John Murphy, and Skip Meyer refuse to let go of their overaged teenage psyches (a oncecommon affliction that, unfortunately, is becoming increasingly uncommon). This should not be interpreted as an insult; on the contrary, it's quite'refreshing to hear a band that still possesses a keen sense of the delicate magic of the Beatles' 'Do You Want To Know A Secret' and Tommy James' 'I Think We're Alone Now.'

If Black Vinyl can be considered an affable anomaly and P/esent Tense a professional throwback to 'power-pop,' then Shoes' new album is surely their vision completely realized. 'Burned Out Love,' 'Found A Girl,' 'Hopin' She's The One,' 'She Satisfies,' 'Only In My Sleep'—the simple titles themselves reveal the album's overriding romanticism, its preoccupation with the fantasies of youth. On 'Girls of Today,' if what you hear is only a song about pubescent sexual frustration (boys pounding pud to Hustler), you've missed the point—the > implicit message is a good and noble one; it says, 'Hey, everybody masturbates—it's okay, gang,' that innocence can be perpetuated even after it has been outgrown.

Occasionally Shoes become mired in Baby Manilow's, corny sentiments ('Karen') or Gary Subhuman's chemical synthetics ('The Things You Do'), but they always pull themselves out with pure lyricism and smart tricks (one being their bow to Fleetwood Mac's Tusk on 'Your Imagination') A primary' criticism could be the sameness of their songs, yet such uniformity can also be considered a reflection of their roots—the flat plains of the Midwest (Zion, Illinois, to be precise), the humdrum landscape that has given us Green Acres and Rick Johnson's prose. Technically proficient and spiritually dean, Shoes are the Cars and Boston with heart and soul still intact.

As for Tongue Twister, it is replete with broken promises, planned escapes, dreams pursued, and the shattered hopes of retriev-. ing "the lost pleasures of adolescence's naive virtues. When this album hits, it's gonna hit hard.

Robert A. Hull

GRACE SLICK

Welcome To The Wrecking Ball _(Grunt)_

This issue will be hitting the stands a week or two after Valentine's Day, so I won't be too remiss in telling Grace Slick that I love her. Not for her slim ex-model's body; not for her old-time.acid queen's sake; not even for (vrooomrawrrl!) somebody to love. Nothing as corny as that.

But for her comely, earthy mind, of course. Take it from Slick herself, as recorded in the May 77 CREEM, in response to a query that she name her least favorite rock critic: 'No one. I like anyone who isn't boring. My favorite is Lester Bangs.' There it is: the true aesthetic of rock writing, summed up in 3,647 fewer words than any 'real' rockcrit would've used.

Even better news is that Grace Slick fed her own head along the way; her new (some would say 'third') solo album, Welcome to the Wrecking Ball, is one of the least boring releases to emerge from this whole careful decade. Check out early '81, sons and daughters of Surrealistic Pillow: Paul Kantner's recovering from a stroke (!); the revamped Jefferson Starship is *zooming along on its merry, Freddy Lakeresque way, after having issued faulty parachutes to the 60's-survivors still clinging to the wings; and Marty Balin's taking up the plumbing trade, so he can tunnel under Moon River, into labelmate Henry Mancini's brain. Bleak news, eh? You'd figure that it's about time for Grace Slick tol get serious and reflective about all 1 her etc. etc. of the past twenty, funI filled years... '

But Welcome to the Wrecking Ball sounds more like the inaugural recording of a just-signed 20-yearold, all cheeky and hopeful and loud and wild and blessedly uneven. The predominant musical style is unashamedly-pro 70's-metal (cf. Aerosmith or Heart before you refer to the native J.A./S. sound), but Grace Slick's attitude is definitely punky, in its raw cockiness, in its blowjobsagainst-the-empire situational ethics. •

Did I say 'Aerosmith?' Yup, Slick and her band seem to have adopted those bea.neaters' compositional methods while they were at it; each cut on Wrecking Ball is (more or less) a hodgepodge collision of r'n'r lyrical bromides, jacked up into a workable song entity via the raucous instrumental riffs. 'Mistreater' alone contains those immortal rock mottoes, 'Got the devil in her heart,' 'Fire and water,' 'Bring you down,' 'She knows how to use it,' and 'Her heart of stone.' Similar examples are endless in this tour de force of sloganeering, but Grace Slick's soaring, roaring, divinely, benignly bpmbastic vocals make 'em all worthwhile again.

Remember a few months back when I told you it's perfectly O K. to like Pat Benatar (especially in the booming refuge of your car radio)? Well, Welcome to the Wrecking Ball is beyond Benatar, Grace Slick's a mature woman who's already transcended simple idealism toward child abuse, she's probably already been tempted by the real hell-is-for-children article, somewhere amid China's teeming millions of seconds of existence. Thankfully ' she kept her cool, but the end result is rock'n'roll!

Happy Valentine's Day 1981., Grace. Pick to click: 'Shot in the Dark' (ersatz police sirens and all.)

Richard Riegel

TOM ROBINSON Sector 27 (IRS.)

About three years ago someone told me about the world's first 100% openly gay rock star, and before 1 had a chance to hear any of his music or see any 8x10 glossies I had a vivid flash-fantasy. I felt sure the guy would look like Marc Bolan, backed-up by three or four similar cutie-pies enlisted for brotherly solidarity. They'd come out swinging with songs in the style of 'All The Young Dudes' or 'Personality Crisis'—a lot of Mott and Dolls* stuff would be the blueprint, turning every glitter tease into reality. No Bowie-Elton bisexual chic for them. They' would go all the way. Lou Reed would be their jumping off point. There would be no need for slogans. Sweaty love songs that kept the gender pronouns honest would be enough. There would be no whining 'write-your-congressman' pleas for understanding. No wimpy didactic nods to the left. It would be politics purely as raw, fun, symmetric sex. An embodiment of the goal rather than the struggle.

Besides the glitter stuff, another of my favorite real life semiexamples was the song 'Bad 'N' Ruin' from Rod Stewart and The races' 1971 album Long Player. Towards the end of the song it at least sounds like Rod is singing: 'I'm a faggot in the first degree/but it don't seem to worry me.' Rod'S apparent true sexuality makes the example hypothetical, but what really matters is the line in relation to the barroom music and Stewart's bawdV just-one-of-the-boys persona of the time—so funny and convincing that it made the literal, trite-onpaper lyric terribly moving.

Of course the real Tom Robinson of TRB turned out to be less a fulfillment of Rod's (alleged) tease than a gay Sidney Poitier—the nonthreatening voice of liberal conscience. Tom's 'Glad To Be Gay' became a civil rights T.V. jingle, with gays as hand-holding noble sufferers—Hal Holbrook in That Certain Summer—cloyingly 'sensitive'—an immediate Ann Landers recommendation for all 'Concerned' parents. Yes, Tom's stance in the real world of The 'Moral' Majority was admirable and necessary. But as art it was insufferably self-righteous, deflatingly literalminded and, oh irony or ironies, asexual. Luckily, a lot of the music was rousing enough, and Danny Kustow's guitar work ripping enough, to make the band's two albums listenable and at times even inspiring.

At first listen, Tom's new Sector 27 band seems promising, moving the singer into more personal, sexual areas and more modern music (kind of like G ang Of Four or Public Image with Steve B's guitar seeming like Keith Levine on the methadone program). The one subtle and interesting sexual allusion here comes in the album's best cut, 'Not Ready,' where Robinson wittily blurs the need for sexual and political commitmerit and his reluctance to accept either: 'I'm down on my knees/ and I'm not ready.' The two more direct man-to-man stories ('Can't Keep Away' and 'Where Can We Go Tonight?') seem to be sexually downtrodden. The love in the former almost dares not speak its name, using the mealy, cryptic line: 'Can't keep away from the other door.' In both tracks, when Tom sings of his poor, poor, pitiful gays it seems a strained comment on repression. His rightious delivery robs the characters of their humanity, reducing them to T.V. documentary cliches. The effect is moralistic and distancing. One wonders—don't Tom and his friends ever just have a simple good lay?

The music also can be heavy handed. That eerie and distorted XTC/Gang Of Four guitar often irhplies too much for Tom's singleintentioned voice, which is best suited to TRB's out-reaching, joyous sound. Still, the music itself is often catchy, with songs like 'Take It Or Leave It' ranking with such old battle hymns as. 'Long Hot Summer.'

Essentially, then, this is the same Tom Robinson as before—frustrating, obnoxious, sometimes exciting, and in the world of today* still needed. Now, as for that fantasy band I mentioned at the start— anyone out there wanna start something?

Jim Farber

REO SPEEDWAGON Hi Infidelity (Columbia)

REO Speedwagon would appear to be just another ten-legged munitions dump, spewing out entire Ethan Allen bedroom groupings of heavy metal to a dizzy army of maniacal loyalists. These fans make their concerts look like a cheerleading clinic in the Reptile House. You ears don't just ring the next day; they make long distance conference calls between coal barges, subway stations and erupting grain elevators.

But as the all-wise Gilligan once put it, even a gorilla will use a napkin if it's neat! While previous REO albums sported a broadly appealing variety (of blunders), Hi I cleans 'em up and plunks 'em down as pretty as moonlit Formica. For once, all the tracks are of uniform quality. Sorry! No larg^ sizes!

We all know that a good sense of humor is as important as your bathroom dice, and the band's previously unreleased ability to not take things seriously is a big plus. 'Tough Guys,' for instance, begins with this brief clip from a real Our Gang Comedy:

(Scene: Alfalfa pushing Darla on a swing while Spanky looks on disgustedly) Spanky: 'Say, Romeo! What about your promise to the He-Man Woman Haters Club?' Alfalfa: 'I'm sorry, Spanky. I have to live my own life.'

Pretty funny, huh? Wait—there's more! Now, your typical metal Oink-o-saurs aren't generally known for their dryly humorous lyrics, but again REO begs to differ. Good lines abound, including: 'the weight may be worth it,' 'they think they're full of fire/she thinks they're full of shit' and 'he's got a long wick, with a flame at both ends.' But is it as long as, say, three consecutive live sentences?

The music's not as funny, but then it's not supposed to be. The main selling .point is REO's allweather formula of strong rhythms, dependable guitars, Cloud Ten keyboards and exploded drawings of melodies. The only performance ranking below 'decent' is 'In Your Letter,' where a twenty-year-old decaying-bag-lunch of a tune is delivered with a cutesy vocal that makes you want to hand Kevin Cronin a pair of surgical snippers and ask him if he's found the toy surprise in his thtoat yet.

Other than that, the material is respectably solid, although fans of substance will have to look elsewhere. As Manley Molpus, president of the American Meat Institute, recently pointed out, 'Even in striketorn Poland, the problem started with meat.' E-Z solution: no meat, no problem! Besides there are all kinds of substances to keep 'em busy with, although most of them are controlled.

The one and only megastinker is 'I Wish You Were There,' a barnacle^ covered ballad, but drop that and you've still gdt a GTP (Good Times Percentage) of .814, higher than such typical pleasure pursuits as driving cars off assembly lines, buying the world a Coke, or filing for illiteracy.

In fact, the only thing more fun than listening to Hi Infidelity is being a fugitive financier or (maybe) appearing on Animals, Animals,. Animals.

Rick Johnson

THE DAMNED The Black Album (IRS.)

The good news is that England's surviving punk pioneers have released their most accessible album to date. Songs like 'Dr. Jekyll' and 'Wait For The Blackout' represent monstrous Vanian, Scabies and cohorts at their darkest, densest best. The band has never written, played or recorded as strongly.

The bad news is that this, their first American record, has been severed at the .cervix from its beautiful British sister. Over there it's a double album (called The Black Album) featuring a side-long live blitz that reprises the Damned's greatest garage hits; it takes no more than one listen to stuff like 'New Rose,'' 'Smash It Up' and 'Second Time Around' to know you're in the presence of pure mindless r&r of the highest caliber.

Without that awesome early

phase as a foundation, this set sounds like an ambitious, better than average workout by an extremely accomplished bunch of post-punk metallurgists. To its credit, The> Damned documents the group's considerable accomplishments well. Those mutant strains of MC5 rave and Frisco psychedelia that cropped up on last year's Machine Gun Etiquette get used to real effect here. 'Lively Arts' and 'History Of The World, Part I' prove the Damned have expanded upon their own pogobase primitivism better than any of their peers (bye, bye Johnny). And 'Sick Of This And That' is just plain stupendous.

If it's high quality hardrock for now people you're after, buy this record; you won't be disappointed. But if you want the dangerously damaged goods on the greatest prockers of the new age, save your coins for the Damned, Damned, Damned and Machine Gun Etiquette imports. They're worth it.

Gene Sculatti

THE JACKSONS Triumph (Epic)

EARTH, WIND & FIRE Faces

__(Epic)

It's not just that I prefer partying and heart-tugging romance to basking in the cosmic glow of harmony and oneness. An occasional dose of the latter isn't necessarily a bad thing ('Come'on people/Smile on your brother/Everybody get together...'), find anyhow, I'm talking about soul/pop music, and if the tune and the sound are, so to speak, in the groove,' then the lyrics aren't of paramount importance (catchiness and smooth rhymes are, however, always appreciated). Both the Jacksons' -Triumph and Earth, Wind & Fife's Faces cover familiar, (pretty much) self-stakedout territories. There are some refinements, a' little exploration, but nothing unexpected—which makes sense; their particular styles have made them each about as successful as any group could sanely hope to be. But where Triumph is, er, triumphantly more of the same, Faces is a drag, an extravagant—fiuo records—drag that is, fatally, less, not more, of the same. And the overt differences between the opening cuts on each album quickly indicate that attitude and the-setting of priorities are the key elements in Triumph's success and Face's failure.

Admittedly, the Jacksons were put on Earth to keep us dancing. As 'Can You Feel It' proves, they're all for love and brotherhood and such. But why stop dancing? Kinetic energy spurs the snap-crackle-pop production, Michael Jackson's irresistable, crisp and liquid tenor is matched by the polyrhythmic structure of the song, and everyone from 'new-wavers' at the Mudd Club to hard-core disco freaks is going to boogie on into the impending revival of the age of Aquarius. Not even heartache stops Michael. The welcome third - generation 'Lovely One'—out of 'Don't Stop 'Till You Get Enough' by way of 'Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)'— is about some girl who's giving Michael grief and driving him insane. But face it, if you keep on dancing, eventually you're going to smile through the tears. Serious business—personal or universal—needn't be serious. Earth, Wind and Fire's 'Let Me Talk,' which sounds pretty much like the other fourteen tracks which follow it, exemplifies everything that is wrong with Faces. It seems that EWF's songs are becoming ever more of 'a pattern—up-beat yet restrained, choppy phrasing, dense and stilted arrangements—because Maurice White (group leader) has forgotten how to relax and have fun. The funk here sounds like little more than a nervous reaction to the seriousness of the song's sociological message. And the 'Heavy' lyrics can't be ignored, because White tortures cliched phrases and news item catch-phrases in order to make a point or simply to come up with a rhyme: 'Get in touch with you, let your love come thru;' 'World automotives chase the Arab wheel/Partnerships on nuclear, trying to make a deal.' Geez.

Earth, Wind & Fire's last album, I Am, was mostly written by Maurice White with outsiders, particularly star-quality pop craftsmen David Foster and Allee Willis. The outside perspectives resulted in lyrics that didn't sound pointedly ridiculous and or embarrassing, and tunes that were clever, distinguishable * pop pieces (perhaps more pop than White wanted). 'Boogie Wonderland' was a refreshingly original dance tune, and 'After the Love Is Gone' was romantic schmaltz of the highest order. At their best, Earth, Wind & Fire soar on soulful magic carpet rides. On Faces, the overwhelming heavy superficiality brings them crashing down to Earth with the dullest of thuds.

Jim Feldman

MONTY PYTHON Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album (Arista)

NATIONAL LAMPOON White Album . _ (Label 21)

I hate comedy albums and I hate the kind of people who like them. I hate it when they play their latest comedy acquisition for you after raving moronically about how hilarious it is and reciting some meaningless out of context punch lines to make their point and then laughing hysterically. I hate it when they play it for you and watch you when their favorite jokes come up, grinning idiotically and nodding encouragement, waiting for you to laugh— laugh!? It's all I can do to keep from running from the room screaming, 'Enough! I can't stand anymore!' I hate that. I hate comedy albums because the kind of people who latch onto them are the same jerks who go around imitating Rich Little's Nixon (I hate Rich Little) or doing Steve Martin's most popular licks (and, of course, they don't get the joke—that Martin is doing a character who thinks he's funny but isn't1—'cause if they did, they wouldn't go around doing it) or saying 'But Nooooo...' very loudly on buses or breathing hot 'Nahnoo Nah-noo''s on the back of your neck at the movies when they're trying to impress their wretched dates. I also hate comedy albums because after you've listened to them once or twice, they're worthless. Unless you're one of the above-mentioned cretins the idea of playing a joke or humorous vignette over and over seems to defeat its comedic purpose—and t it's unseemly. Like, when you read this review you may not think that it's all that amusing, but you're only ' expected to read it once (nobody's pretending that I have anything to say here that's worth repeating)* and preferably quickly (which is how it was written), and that's a virtue not to be dismissed lightly. Comedy records, by definition, are meant to be heard more than once—indeed, many many times— and very few can stand the attention.

Both the new Python and Lampoon albums succeed in part in overcoming the onus of being comedy albums because both of them—irt part—are genuinely funny. You don't have to be a drooling feeb to want to hear them more than once. Especially the Python, which is the most whimsical of the two and,' in its best moments, remarkably pointless with cuts like 'I Like Chinese,' 'Finland,' and 'Muddy Knees' having nothing to do with anything and succeeding on those terms. Marginally relevant cuts like 'I'm So Worried,' 'Never Be Rude To An Arab,' and 'Sit On My Face' are somewhat less successful but still possess a certain ^interior pointlessness while out and out satires like 'Henry Kissinger,' 'Bishop' and 'Farewell To John Denver,' while stillhaving a pointless subtext, as it were, pall the quickest. It seems that satire suffers most from being on record—perhaps because of its intrinsically ephemeral nature or perhaps just because, I dunno—while unabashed whimsy fares best. Which is why the Lampoon record isn't quite as funny. Being an American album there isn't a hell of a lot of whimsy on it and the. satire—mostly on white middle-class concerns-and fads (hence the title)—will enlist hohums from knowing comedy buffs. There's also a cut of 'Shakespeare Knock Knocks' that Wayne and Schuster would be ashamed to do, and a lot of jokes on the fart and caca level, really dreadful stuff. On the plus side, there's a gaggle of fag jokes for people who are into that problematic genre (Chevy Chase doing a gay Charles Brorfeon is especially timely) and some musical parodies that stand repeating.

Overall then, the Python record is recommended to those who, like myself, loathe comedy albums but enjoy a good pointless joke while the Lampoon record is mostly for undiscriminating satire addicts and those who think that Charles Rocket's All-American smirk is just about the best think on TV. I hate those kind of people.

Richard C. Walls

THE ROMANTICS National Breakout _, (Nemperor)

'I get off when you get on me.' Sorry, but you're wrong if you identified that statement as Ron's initial declaration to Nancy on their wedding night. Actually, it's the opening line on 'Tomboy,' the Romantics' most frantic effort to date and the lead-off cut on this, their second LP. It's a truly revvedup combo of Merseybeat mayhem and usurped gunslingin' Diddley rhythm. Comes complete with totally enthusiastic atmosphere and classically stupid couplets like 'I think that you re so attractive/Until you get your muscles' ac-tive.' Guaranteed to make you get terminally raucous and furiously shake invisible maracas in your girlfriend's face until she slaps you to your senses. But after I finally tore myself away from 'Tomboy' after a dozen successive spins and finally listened through the rest of the album, I discovered that calling the album National Breakout is a clearcut case of classically misguided wishful thinking.

Because 'Tomboy' is the exception here, not the rule; the rest of this platter is disconcertingly average, with any real outbreaks of action and/or excitement thoroughly held in check. Peter (nee Pete) Solley's production frequently points the way towards Rave On City but the band keeps stumbling off the path. The temperature never rises above the lukewarm mark.

I mean big deal, so Gerry and the Pacemakers could've had a midlevel hit with 'Forever Yours,' Beatlesque chord changes and all. The Animals would've been sure to steer clear of 'Stone Pony,' despite the Nancy 'Boots' Sinatra vocal reference. And nobody in their right mind's gonna give more than half an ear to instant (and lengthy) forgettables like 'A Night Like This' and '21 And Over,' the latter featuring patented fake I.D. 'hard love' posturings.

The trouble is, the '64-'65 brighteyed Anglo territory the Romantics persist, in mining has already been done to death and done a lot better by such ancestral stalwarts as the Raspberries. It's all been done before, and the only thing that can make it sound new again is (at the least) unlimited reserves of enthusiasm. Excepting 'Tomboy,' there's no evidence here than any such reserves remain to be drawn on. Guitars charged up by the numbers, hackneyed Brit.-Inv.-styled workouts,-and fatal over-reliance on the past for inspiration do not a masterpiece make. As usual, many recycle but few revitalize. 'Such has it ever been, such shall it ever be'— Mamie. Van Doren explaining to onlooker^ why her backfield is in perpetual motion in High School Confidential.

Craig Zeller

When I first saw Steve Winwood perform with Traffic at the Fillmore East in 1968,1 realized he was one of the most naturally talented rock musicians I'd ever seen. In a group of talented musicians Winwood's unforgettable singing and keyboard and guitar playing simply stole the show. He was obviously a master, a musician strong enough to make you just about forget about his virtuoso charges through 'Gimme Some Loving' and 'I'm A Man' a few years before under the ostensible direction of Spencer Davis.,

Traffic's deterioration, however, was even more spectacular than its rise, and in 1970 Winwood subsequently presided over one of the most boring sets I've ever witnessed on a rock stage fronting the Traffic remains. A lot of excuses were preferred as to demise; drugs were often* noted as the agent of Winwood's personal decline. Be that as it may, when Traffic finally gave up the ghost Winwood continued to be reclusive, and his first solo album, the 1977 Steve Winwood (not to be confused with the two record retrospective set under the same name * released by United Artists and subsequently squelched by Winwood himself) was presented almost as an afterthought, albeit a rich one.

STEVE WINWOOD Arc of a Diver (Island)

Steve Winwood had the personal aesthetic stamp of a true solo album, but most of the personnel on the record were Traffic holdovers, so there was a sense that the record could have been fortunate outtakes from that band's last days. „ Arc Of A Diver, however, is a solo album in all musical respects. Winwood has turned the lyric writing chores over to a trio of friends— Will Jennings, George Fleming and ex-Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band leader Viv Stanshall—but every melody and note on the record is written and played by Winwood himself. The results are pretty impressive. Winwood's sweet, resonant vocals—that eerie, mystical voice always evokes the pastoral image of damp spring days on a mist-shrouded English heath—are bathed in a lush texture of synthesizer washed, hypnotic rhythm tracks and sparse, well conceived guitar and keyboard fills. 'Night Train' plies the formula brilliantly, cruising along in synthetic splendor until the beautiful, climaxing guitar solo that ends up providing the song's focus.

Winwood has successfully managed to avoid the lack of tension that seems to plague many of the albums on which a single musician plays all the instruments. His musical imagination and playing chops are strong enough to overcome stylistic singlemindedness in a way strangely reminiscent of Stevie Wonder. Even his drumming fits well, especially in conjunction with the trance-like synthesizer sequencer used on 'Spanish Dancer.'

The record's real showpiece, though, is the title track, co-written with Stanshall. The lyrics are the best on the record, an interesting glimpse into StanshalFs madcap sensibility. The combination of Winwood's melodic sense and Stanshall's surrealist imagery, which began years ago with 'Dream Gerrard' from Traffic's When The Eagle Flies, creates an alchemical vision similar to the esoteric dreams which graced early Traffic albums when Winwood, Dave Mason and Jim Capaldi were trading ideas. Here Winwood plays some of the best guitar parts on the record, including a wrenching fill at the beginning that sets a tone for the song reminiscent of the twisted melodicism of the .Traffic classic 'Colored Rain.' By the end of 'Arc Of A Diver' Stanshall and Winwood have stopped time, and promise to keep the clocks on hold 'until yesterday.' Why turn back the hands of time when you can wait for them to catch up. to you again?

John Swenson

M

The Official Secrets Act

(Sire)

VISAGE

(Polydor)

WALL OF VOODOO

_(Index/IRS) ._

The 1980's are now well under way, so it's an exciting time to be

alive. Why? 'Cause it's the future, dummy. How do 1 know? 'Cause all these records keep coming out that go chng chng chng chng/szt szt szt/ooooeeee ooooeeee ooeeooee ooeeooee KMP! And back in '75 or so, there was this critic who said that Kraftwerk were the future of rock 'n' roll and since lotsa these new bands sound sorta like Kraftwerk, this must be the future. No? Well, maybe a fact or five are out of order, but it's true that more people are kloning the Kling Klang Klung these days than cruising the Jersey coast in search of Springsteen retreads.

Who are these groups? Well, there's M. Remember 'Pop Muzik?' That's M; Whether or not they're a group remains a mystery to me, Maybe we should call 'em Robin Scott & Associates, since the theme of corporate intrigue is flashed in our faces so often; anybody looking to satisfy his/hers mindless Eurotdisco Abbatite is gonna have to look elsewhere.

The ideas here are meaty, but too often the tunes come across like cotton candy, made more attractive by M's admittedly amazing production. But great pop music is dependent on high quality pop songs', 'Relax' and 'Keep It To Yourself' are paranoid pop of the highest order and 'Join The Party' is okay for a spin or two, but most of this stuff could have been kept behind locked doors without bothering me a whole lot. Since their last album was equally spotty, maybe M should think EP instead of LP.

The neat-noises-in-search-of-awhy-bother syndrome also shows its face on the Visage record. Since most of the musicians are on loan from Magazine and Ultravox, a lot of this, sounds pretty good, if you happen to like the new generation of technorockers. But vocalist Steve Strange never rises above my Bowie-come-lately first impression and often as not, he's buried so far back in the mix that he makes virtually no impact at all. Again, there are a few exceptions; 'Fade To Grey,' 'Mind of a Toy' and 'Visa-age' stick with me, but the rest of the songs fade away themselves, despite several nice instrumental touches.

Fading away is not a probletn with Wall of Voodoo; they hang in there even when you might not want em to. And stuffing an LF with cream filling isn't a problem either since this is only a 12" EP. What is the problem then? Well, like most current L.A. bands Wall of Voodoo sound weaker and more derivative on record than they do in person. The things that make 'em unique, like Joe Nanini's percussion paradiddles off the drum machine pulse and Marc Moreland's syncopated guitar rhythms, are played down here and the themes of assembly line lunacy and sociosexual dysfuntion echo DEVO and Ultravox a bit too directly. Still, their industrial strength version of 'Ring Of Fire,' which finds Moreland moving from Duane Eddy strums to Fripp-like freakouts, is effective, and their polyrhythms keep 'em well off the Numan bandwagon, something that can't be said about every electronicallyoriented band in 1980.

What's that? Did someone say it's 1981 already? Damn. Keeping up with the future can be difficult.

Michael Davis

ADAM & THE ANTS

Kings Of The Wild Frontier

_(Epic)_'

This is ridiculous.

never the Ants, have you? Alright, you saw an old copy of NME in some Anglo-groupie's bathroom and glimpsed a withering putdown of said wankers. Boy, they get a lot of nasty press back home. But does that mean you'll pay a bunch of good American dough-re-mi to hear Adam and aforementioned Ants grimly railing against Nick Kent and his kind on a track called 'Press Darlings'? I hope not.

Should you be tempted to fork it over, be further forewarned: half the songs on Kings Of The Wild Frontier concern Adam, the Ants, Antpeople, and a purely hypothetical 'Ants Invasion' featuring something optimistically named 'Antmusic.' Personally, I'm not holding my breath.

Imagine finding 'Glass Onion' on side two of Meit the Beatles. Consider a Pete Townshend opera called Roger. Dwell, if you will, on a Paul Stanley ballad about the East Coast distributors of Kiss beltbuckles. Then tell me if any of these! make less sense than Adam and the Ants' self-referential sludge. Me, I think not.

What about the handful of tunes here that aren't simple plugs, for what I will now title 'Antproduct'? Well, there's 'Jolly Roger,' which some have seen as a send-up of Adam's old manager M. McLaren. (Conveniently, Adam himself is not aboye dressing up as a pirate onstage.) Then there's 'Human Beings,' an attempted Indian warcry that sounds like a great singalong number for the kids at Camp Powhatten. And then there's...well, there's...lessee...

Oh, yeah. Adam fired his old band (they're now BowWowWow of 'C30 C60 C90' infamy) and hired a swell bunch of new guys for this, his first CBS waffle. There're two (count 'em) drummers on board to punch up Adam's preoccupation with savage rhythms. Still, the effect is less My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and more, well, Camp Powhatten. Bassist Kevin Mooney is, at 18, the youngest member of the group. 'Nuff said. Lead guitarist and partner-in-song Marco Pirroni began life as a meat roll and did time with Siouxsie and the Banshees, before hooking up with Adam Ant and his merry crew.

Adam Ant is still a meat roll.

Wesley Strick

DONNA SUMMER

The Wanderer

(Geffen)

Grasping the wine-filled greenish rood of his weekend arrogance tightly to his fleshy breast he sits down at the kitchen table and begins to (sip) brood over (sip, sip) the fawning demise of disco music (sip, sip, sip), its crazed, contradictory, mutation into (gulp, gulp, gulp) ritualistic new wave formalism (hie). And, of course, Donna Summer:

Drifting through the citified smog of. bejewelled, dull-eyed discopharoahs, of rhyme mutants crawling with festering rhythm wounds, of zombie-stunned chorus girls doing monotonous barbiturate dervishes to the insistent, megaindustrial thumpings of some cosmically inspired bassist, wanders a dazed gothic-huntress desperately trying to overcome the Romanized decay of a musical beast that she, herself,'was partially responsible for creating. The old Frankenstein ploy lingers in the wing.

Donna Summer's career-exploding orgone-bleats instantly made her the houri of the hour. These sensual puffs 'n' wheezes also sent her strolling through numberless, crumbling, urban bodegas overflowing with jump-cut epileptic strobe light furies—alien fashions adorning pasty bodies caught up in the throes of precision acrobatics thinly disguised as simple boogiefunk-get downs and countless other scenerios of purling decadence. She quickly" became a sensual mummer acting out an apocalyptic juba of babylonian wickedness, designed specifically to awaken in the masses the great lords of fuck.

Unlike the current chilly suburbanity of Debbie Harry, her acknowledged successor as the haremchild of the disco-booboisie ('Heart of Glass' was after all, responsible for almost singlehandedly revitalizing the sagging musical ghost, giving it a sneeringly formidable respectability while simultaneously stroking a gleaming sonic-shiv, spang, into its quivering pizzle—creating in the process the detonatable pop mess we now so bullishly hail as 'New Wave'), Summer's ebony reign was earth-cool—as opposed to Debbie's city-cool—resplendent with not only her nature-inspired beauty and jungle-frenzied voice, but, also, despite all of the accompanying sensual flummery, a remarkably brittle innocence.

That carefully masked innocence, when allowed to occasionally breathe, made Donna Summer a frail, sexual apparition haunting to behold. An apparition easily uglified by the routinized minions of the ever-hysteroidal simoleon cabals and thusly, an apparition quickly dumped on by the self-righteousness of those silver-tongued guardians of musical morality (aka, c,ritics.) Who could take seriously the Queen of the disco-booboisie, when by self-definition, the discobooboisie paid nightly homage to such insidious things as chain-gang aesthetics, tribalistic deodorizations of individual spirit, insentient passion, and the inalienable ability of 'everyone' to dance through the night practicing the unholy rites of the big pick-up and the forbidden nectars of the BIG SCORE!!!???

As disco lapsed into a fleering gangs of lefnures wafting through the dawn air, confused by their own potential annihilation, talents like Donna Summer were allowed, by the good-graces of the $-cabals, to seek out and explore new avenues of musical (aka..$) expression. Wuzza, wuzza. Enter The Wanderer, her first leap into the churning pit of swishing rock vertigo. While no blazing rockathon, this album does show off a winning, ampcharged voice and an unmistakable feeling for the form that'll no doubt gain it the good blessings of the Devi guardians of rock's precious spirit.

Where else but within the confines of rock 'n' roll could such a much maligned innocence as Donna Summer's be allowed to settle in and, hopefully, mature. Rock 'n' roll with all of its; hip-cocked attitudes is a perfect, and fertile, breeding culture for her kind of unmistakable talent. As soon as she discovers all the beauty and finitude of its contradictory nature, her innocence finely sculpted into a roaring mass of rhythm, raunch ranching and general all around disrespect for the gods of order, she just might cause a ripple or two in the collective rock conciousness. From the 50's tinged echo-noise of the title track, through the ghostly 'Grandt Illusion,' with its lurking electronic motes and alien handclaps, and on to the understated regality of 'I Believe In Jesus,' Donna Summer's first {attempt at crossing over into the 'suburbs of the rockopolis is something of a,minor joy...believe me...it's true...

He smiled messily (sip), stumbled into the cellar (sip, gulp, hie), and fell to his knees in semi-slumber next to the quietly blazing furnace, feeling overpowering contentment with the only honest warmth he'd felt in 33 years. As he looked through half-open eyes, he thought to himself, in a pulsing surreal mind-cramp, 'to hell with new wave ritualistic formalism, any how!' Turning his head to one side he noticed the washing machine doing a shimmy shammy across the floor, lurching its way towards his drunken genuflection...in a sad, low, nicely frightened voice, he murmured 'the Wisk!', 'Oh, the Wisk!'

Joe (Momus Man) Fernbacher