SQUEEZE East Side Story (A&M)

Consider. A band with decidedly bent pop bearings (and more than a light touch of merseybeat croon-a-toon McCartneyatrics), associated with John Cale in the founding phase of punk (first EP: ’77), loses its boogie-based pianist, takes on a keyboardist from the heyday of pub-rock and, as a new producer, the most brilliantly belligerent singersongwriter of Britain’s (ahem) new wave, proceeds to make an album that harkens back to the halcyon era of English studio experimentation: an LP that leans snugly alongside the likes of Odessey And Oracle (Zombies), Evolution (Hollies), Something Else By The Kinks, Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake (Small Faces) (the record even has fourteen songs, just like the Parlophone Revolver, and one moderately trippy ballad is called “There’s No Tomorrow,” and there’s a cousin to Ms. E. Rigby on “Vanity Fair”)... well, you get the idea. I hope.

For Squeeze, a wink is as good as a hook, and the combination is nirvana. It may be fun to play spotthe-influence, to giggle at the band’s cheeky electicism, but fact is, East Side Story is consistently tuneful (Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford are skillfull at pop pastiche), more clever than cute, an entertaining co-joining of the oddball and the traditional. Jools Holland is gone, and in his place is Paul Carrack, ex-Ace (“How Long”), who pitches in with a Winwoody lead vocal on “Tempted,” behind which Tilbrook and Elvis Costello do mock-Temptations falsetto-bass back-up work, complete with “whoo-whoo”s and “dit-dit”s. Costello produced (with Roger Bechirian), wittily, and not in his own constricted-intense gar: age-soul style. (The one time when, hearing a speeded-up “Time Is Tight” bassline plus organ, I said, “Ah hah! Blatant Get Happy!! move!,” the track turned out to be produced by Dave Edmunds.)

(Have I said yet what a delight this album is? I’ll get around to it.)

In the main, Squeeze are very British. Cool For Cats, the album before last (the also-neat Argybargy) contained two songs named after 60’s English films (“Up The Junction” and “The Knack”), one called “It’s Not Cricket,” and the title track was sung by Difford in a cockney tongue that would have given Professor Higgins a coronary. Some suggested that this was a hindrance to acceptance in the U.S.A. (my theory: radio programmers got too many calls complaining that the stylus was stuck on “If I Didn’t Love You,” the most airplayable cut). East Side Story, although still a bit steeped in U.K. vernacular, and containing a song about Piccadilly (wonderful: mentions an adulterous pregnancy, a purple hair, dryer, curry, and Trini Lopez), is not quite so regionally oriented: Who reading this magazine (well, writing this review at any rate) can’t relate to the romantic situation in the springy “Is That Love,” wherein right off the bat this girl leaves the ring this guy gave her by the soap (that is, the ring is by the soap, not the guy or the giving)? She keeps dumping on him, he stays home and reads and drinks.

(Alcohol is a heavy East Side Story motif: take “Labelled With Love,” a country-western tale about an English woman who marries an American pilot during the war, goes back with him to Texas where he drinks himself to death, whereby she returns to England and becomes a solitary boozer; or “Woman’s World”: the heroine gets sick of pressing toaster buttons and goes on a barroom binge; then there’s the barmaid in “Heaven,” and...)

“Someone Else’s Heart” and “Someone Else’s Bell” (no fear of auteuristic criticism here!) are nifty numbers that detail quintessential^ —who else, by the by, would open an album with something tagged “In Quintessence,” at least part of which seems to discuss onanism as a hobby?—Squeezian entanglements. On the Zombie-like “Heart,” lovers dig through each other’s diaries and love letters; on “Bell,” they cope with romance gone blah by contemplating, or actually commiting (those accents!) acts of infidelity. Line from the latter; “I’m feeling like a punch line in someone else’s joke.”

The scrupulous reviewer should also point out that, like Beatle,Paul at his best, Glenn Tilbfook (Costello’s duetist on that excellent Trust track, “From A Whisper To A Scream”) is so engagingly versitile that he skirts facility. On side two, singing all seven songs, he does mild psychedelia, orchestral pathos, ingratiating uptempo pop, that boozy country narrative, and ends it all with a performance that can only be described (by me, that is) as Tahoe rockabilly. Don’t ask me to explain.

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD.

The Flowers Of Romance

(Warner Bros.)

I really should have expected this. Any band that would book passage on American Bandstand and then think it cute (or significant or whatever) to jump overboard en route is clearly beyond beating a dead horse—they’d rather set it on fire in the family room—some fun, huh? Still, I thought Second Edition was one of the last year’s best records, full of the brilliant tensions that seeming contradictions (pulsing form/floating formlessness, fan expectation/band exploration) can produce when manipulated by a master. And when John Lydon a/k/a Rotten seemed to thrive on manipulating contradictions the way Keith Richard thrives on Chuck Berry.

All the signs of imminent decline were also there: an extremely malleable aesthetic, a reluctance to distinguish between good and not so good work, and a sullen, bratty delight in not just disappointing but abusing Johnny’s old Sex Pistols fans. (A very pointed, but, in America where the Pistols approached Sir Lord Baltimore in drawing power, a rather pointless exercise.) At any rate, after a live LP recorded early last year in Paris, on which PiL plumbed new lows in performer/audience relations, the band came apart. Jah Wobble, the extraordinary bass player and necessary foil, was cast out rather acrimoniously and last drummer Martin Atkins was retained briefly as a session man and then let go as well. All of which leaves Lydon and co-conspirator Keith Levene buck naked and snarling, holding Flowers Of Romance as if to spite their limitations and history.

From the very first cut, “Four Enclosed Walls” (cardboard Islam— Lydon as muezzin calling the faithful to their prayers and calling for “a new crusade”), to the very last, “Francis Massacre” (unfathomable comment on a convicted murderer accompanied by frenzied drumming and yipping, ending with a little metal machine music), Levene and Lydon offer variations on the awfully tired “inspired primitive” routine. Some tracks might have worked—“Track 8” and “Phenagen,” for example — but a,re sabatoged as Lydon first singsongs anti-sexual sentiments and then furiously excoriates a player to be named later. (All the lyrics are lovingly reproduced on the inner sleeve.) “Flowers Of Romance” and “Under The House” are dominated by ersatz tribal drumming and “Hymie’s Him,” an instrumental!, features abstract thudding, fairly regular clacking, and organish electronics—a postmodern “Quiet Village.” In ‘/Banging The Door,” with its ominous metal drone, John clarifies his stance vis a vis his real or imagined horde of fans: “Keep banging the door,” he insists, “I won’t let you in.” And I thought no one was worse off than Cubs fans.

Adrift and singularly unattractive without Wobble’s resonant bass, Flowers Of Romance is a collection of nine skeletal cartoons and meandering notions of a possibly

sinister, certainly unpleasant nature from a very cocky pop refugee turned art snob suffering from a lethal overdose of UK attention. Before the contradictions completely overwhelm the manipulator, I prescribe an extended stay in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where nobody reads New Musical Express and the total sales of Sex Pistols and PiL records have barely broken into double figures. Time to cool out. Then, if there’s more to come we’ all be thankful. And if, like Iggy, they have nothing interesting to say right now, we’ll all be thankful for the silence.

Jeff Nesin

MOODY BLUES Long Distance Voyager (Threshold)

Hard as it is to believe, there is actually something quasi-interesting about the new Moody Blues album. (Well, at least more interesting than say, an in-depth interview with David Crosby). After a spiritual hibernation of almost three years, the Moody Boobs have deemed to address us once again from the mountains of Tibet, only this time their sermonette has a slightly different twist. Of course, there’s the usual macrobiotic babble about “yesterday,” “tomorrow,” and “dreams” (the three most important words in the Moodies’ vocabulary, used for any and all purposes, especially whenever they don’t know how to fill out a line), but underneath all this slow-cooked brown rice, there’s a snatch of something that has never appeared on a Moody Blues album beforehonesty.

Don’t faint just yet—this alleged “honesty” is most likely unintentional. The last song on the album is an autobiographical revelation called “Veteran Cosmic Rocker,” which simply as a title is already a step up on the honesty scale from one member claiming to be “just a singer in a rock ’n’ roll band” a few years back. Here, our sages sing about their fear of dying, and therein lies a mystery. Do they rear croaking from sheer frustration with what they’re doing? From boredom? From intolerable alienation from the mere mortals who comprise their audience? All of these are certainly

credible possibilities, but the one most directly implied is answer C— alienation from the audience— since the band here labels their fans “a crowd of fools.1’ (Bullseye, guys!!) Such open contempt is so thrillingly

obnoxious, it even upstages the song’s introduction—one of those you-must-hear-it-to-believe-it spoken “poems” so adored by the truly perverse. (I’ll lay bets these odes still get more space in high school yearbooks than even Gibran.)

TOO MUCH SUN AND SMOG MAKES TOM A DULL BOY

TOM PETTY

& THE HEARTBREAKERS Hard Promises (Backstreet)

by Jon Pareles

Los Angeles’ rock ideal is the pits. Specifically, the La Brea Tar Pits: stand still for a little while and you’ll be sucked in forevermore. You’ll probably like it—don’t those dinosaurs look cheerful?

Actually, what happens in L.A. is that they get the old news out of New York—time zone difference plus jet lag plus about a year and a half—and then slow it down, polish it up, put in a blonde package and open it on 400 AOR stations nationwide. By the time you realize exactly what’s being recycled, it’s a hit and you’re stuck with it. You might even get to like it.

Whatever bohunk town Tom Petty’s from—Gainesville, Florida? —he’s an Angeleno now. It takes him a long time to finish an album. It takes him a long time to get through a song. It probably takes him a long goddamn time to finish the TV page of the L.A. Times, but that’s his problem. He always wanted to be an Angeleno anyway—otherwise, why spend his Wonder years imitating those Angeleno’s Angelenos: the Byrds and the Doors. Except, being a bohunk, Petty got the imitations wrong. The Byrds were about airplanes and flangers, the Doors were about sex ’n’ death ’n’ lizards. Petty, being an original sort of bohunk, wanted to be about rock ’n’ roll and romance. Bingo—an artist for the 80’s.

What saved Petty was that he’s so dumb he believes all the romance stuff. On album after album, he’d come up with a couple of 3Vaminute tearjerkers like “Listen To Her Heart” and the amazing “Refugee,” songs so plainspoken and earnest that—this being pop— stolen riffs hardly matter. Back in New York, though, no one believes that a rocker could be that dumb and lovable without a concept. So they shipped Petty his concept: hero of rock ’n’ roll, heartbroken but ready for more, sweetheart of the radio. The concept package includes a Springsteen catalog: recycled Phil Spector keyboards, I-VI chords, yearning, angst, booming sound (check out the drums on Hard Promises and the drums on You’re Gorina Get It!). Slowed down, polished up, a coupla years oldripe for L.A.

Up to a point, the concept’s OK. It’s fine with me if Petty writes love songs exclusively; he’s already done too many rock ’n’ roll anthems. He’s coined a few new pop verities, too, notably “You can still change your mind.” (Can he?) And so far, the concept hasn't improved his diction; any goon who can put three syllables in the word “big” has got something going for him. Sooner or later, though, the grandiosity is gonna catch up with Petty. When he starts telling a girl that she’s “the Dark Angel” while he’s “left in the dust,” you can say goodbye to inarticulate genius and hello product. Meanwhile, those riffs keep on pulling, pulling, down into the primeval murk. Like Petty himself: they’re a little too slow, but they grab you.

Interestingly, the fear of death angle is not just confined to “Veteran Cosmic Rocker.” There’s also a song called “22,000 Days” which is a lot of kvetching about how short a time we have to live. Songs like this make the album’s title, Long Distance Voyager, seem less a selfcongratulatory statement on the band’s survival (obvious intention) than a show of regret for how much time has already passed them by.

Elsewhere on the album, instead of checking for crow’s feet, the band finds solace in reverting to childhood, which isn’t really a big step for a group whose best song-of-all-time is about riding a seesaw. In one piece, John Lodge equates annoying a lover with “talking out of turn”—just the sort of school age holdover you’d expect from the guys who reduced psychedelic art-rock to the realm of Barry Manilow. (Warning: this is exactly the sort of snoozak that still fills the band’s grooves.)

The piece that will really put you on the threshold of a scream, though, is Ray Thomas’ “Painted Smile,” with music too corny for Danny Kaye, vocal delivery too juvenjle for Paul McCartney, and lyrics which again condescend to the audience (i.e., clownscrytoo, but— woe-is-me—no one understands!). Following “Painted Smile” with “Veteran Cosmic Rocker” and letting the album end there gives the whole affair such an incredibly bitter edge that if you felt like overlooking the band’s dim-witted perceptions you could almost feel Sorry for the old fogies. But then again, it’s hard to get up too much sympathy for a group that peaked with “Go Now.”

Jim Farber

X

Wild Gift (Slash)

X may be the hottest L. A. band at the moment but I must admit it took me a while to warm to their first LP. The group’s musical limitations, their casual amphetamine trashing of the Doors’ “Soul Kitchen,” and the length of the album itself (under 28 minutes) all added up to IRRITATION and therefore, was only useful to me as a soundtrack for those “special” moments—like when you’re driving down Sunset in September and you can’t even see the Hollywood Hills, even though they’re only a few blocks away and you can feel your lung cells turning brown with every breath you take and the well-built hitchhiker you just picked up laughs about five seconds and turns out to have bruises in the strangest places and as soon as she touches your leg, you know her ultimate destination is your wallet, not your Crotch—and then John and Exene break in, yelling, “The world’s a mess, it’s in my kiss,” and make some kind of insane sense out of the scene.

But anyway, on to the new album. Again, my first impression was negative. Ten seconds into it and all I can think of is, “Geez, another punkabilly intro; haven’t these people learned any new riffs?” After a few spins, though, it becomes apparent that they have, actually; Wild Gift is no Xerox of Los Angeles.

And except for the absence of producer Ray Manzarek’s organ, the changes are for the best. Billy Zoom’s double-tracked guitars fill up the empty spaces and even though I know I’ve heard every one of his licks before, I’ve never heard ’em in these kinds of contexts. The juiciest juxtaposition comes on “Beyond And Back” where Zoom’s goodtime rockabilly riffs try to dance with Exene’s tired snarl—“Shut up & smoke”—to no avail; like most of X’s best songs, the tension fades uneasily away instead of being neatly resolved.

Another change for the better is that both Exene and John Doe are singing better now—and I don’t mean just hitting the notes more often. They’ve both got more character in their voices, particularly Doe, who almost croons on “White Girl” and “Adult Books,” moves to Morrisonics on “Universal Comer,” and elsewhere lets loose with some of the most powerful growls in rock ’n’ roll.

And the songs? Well, with the exception of “It’s Who You Know,” a tightly-controlled elbow in the ribs that’s too true to be a hit, they’re disjointed as hell. Dark explosions of imagery and blurred actions set to clumsy melodies over elemental rhythms—put their tunes under a microscope and they begin to smell funny fast.

But let ’em dry out in the exhaust-filled desert air and they begin to shape up as something more substantial. On songs like “In This House That I Call Home” and “When Our Love Passed Out On The Couch,” X aren’t content to tell you about anxiety, claustrophobia and jealousy, they want you to experience it in all its disorienting glory, as if it were a part of your very own life. You remember life, don’t you? Or at least the good parts? Like that weekend your best friend drank your last beer and got you so pissed off that you tried to flush it and him down the toilet and ended up screwing up the plumbing so your landlord got upset and raised your rent $25/month and then an exgirlfriend dropped by dusted to the max and introduced you to her shapely new roommate who not only could barely focus her eyes but who insisted on playing Back In Black so goddamn loud that when your boss called...

...Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot that all you really want to do was learn to forget.

Michael Davis

GARY U.S. BONDS Dedication (EMI America)

Let’s announce the bad tidings right in front: This record is a helluva disappointment. But then, I probably shouldn’t have expected too much in the first place. For one thing, Daddy G and the Church Street 5 are nowhere in sight. Worse than that, Frank Guida, the producer extraordinaire who ran roughshod over the controls back in the early 60’s when Gary was batting out hit after ecstatically cacophonous hit, is equally nowhere to be found. And from the sounds of Dedication, Bonds without Guida is like the Crystals without Spector— good voices in search of a cataclysmic groove.

Holding the producer’s reins (one in each hand) for Bonds’ re-entrance into the recording world are Miami Steve and Bruce Springsteen, the world’s biggest “Quarter To Three” fan. I’m sure these goombahs had their hearts in the right place, i.e., to give U.S. another shot at some fame and fortune, but they’ve let him down every which way in them there grooves.

Bruce (who has just opened a chain of “Bom To Run Red Lights” driving schools all over Jersey) contributes three of his own concoctions. That trio of songs is the reason for 99% of Dedication’s airplay. FM jocks don’t give a good goddamn about Bonds, they just wanna dole out more B.S. product to the fans. You’ll notice they rarely (if ever) follow up “This Little Girl” or “Your Love” (a quintessential Southside Johnny cast-off), with any past Bonds blasts like “School Is Out” or “Dear Lady Twist.” Bonds gets played because of the Bruce connection and that’s it.

At least the title cut gets points for making a half-hearted nod to the jubilant U.S. workouts of yesteryear, and I actually enjoy that spelling bee finale. If you want all-out lowpoints, try Miami’s “Daddy Come Home,” 6:22 of overblown spleen-baring. Gary’s attempt to simulate gut-wrenching anguish avail him naught with a beheaded turkey like this.

What about the “contemporary”oriented remakes? Well, in a word, they’re ludicrous. Bonds wading into “The Pretender” is like hearing Screamin’ Jay Hawkins warble “Nights In White Satin.” In a word, ridiculous. So are “From A Buick 6” and “It’s Only Love”—c’mon, we don’t need any more kiss-ass interpretations of Dylan/Beatles material If the producers had shown a little more imagination and a little less hero-worship, we might’ve gotten to hear Bonds rail into the express lane-rambunctiousness of truly racous stuff like Cooper’s “Under My Wheels” or Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noise.” Hell, I would’ve settled for a ten-minute rave-up of “If You Wanna Be Happy,” Jimmy Soul’s stupidly sexist but irresistable hand-clapper on how to get the most out of matrimony (and another Guida production).

What’re ya gonna do? Rock ’n’ roll comebacks have a nasty habit of falling through. I only wish Bonds had done something to warrant his reborn popularity besides having a glorious past that most people have blindly bypassed to get to his lousy latest. Be good to yourself and get a fresh copy of “Quarter To Three” today. You too can recapture the thrill of permanently taking the party out of bounds at 2:45. Go go Daddy, wherever you are.

Craig Zeller

ROMEO VOID It’s A Condition (415 Records)

If you tore Romeo Void’s debut LP down to its essence, what you’d get wouldn’t be a million miles away from a collection or torch songs. The type Billie Holliday once did so magnificently, like “Hello Heartache.” Debora Iyall’s lyrics may well be definably about life after the death of romance as seen in a post-lib 80’s kid, but you can still feet her deep yearning for someting more than Reed-like detachments, and that is perhaps what makes Romeo Void so special.

Romeo Void’s sounds go from bluesy late-nite jazz club atmospheres to past-punk rock steadied, all mixed low enough to delight without shattering Iyall’s excellent vocals. Iyall is a one shot chanteuse, but what a shot. Like a good actress, she gives you a range of emotions: sultry, bitchy, despairing, angry. She sounds the way we always hoped another Debbie would one day.

It’s A Condition isn’t for partying, and you can hardly dance to it (a mixed blessing). It’s for feeling sorry for yourself, for the irritational and (for me at least) far-too-often comedowns, for the “casual/

casualties” that live in the grooves. On “Talk Dirty (To Me),” Benjamin Bossi’s saxophone haunts the song, his sax not integrated into the music, more added attraction than byproduct, catching you unaware, enriching the sounds but not nearly the whole. Iyall seems trivialized by the loveless sex she matter-ofrecounts. Cheap thrills quickly becoming drudgery: “Leave the lights on/then the moths come/ one night only/in the hallway.” The come hither vocals belying the going-through-the-motions lyrics.

“White Sweater” is a nightmare (literally), but you are left to connect the dots and dot the i’s. “Confrontation” becomes a kiss-off, the polarized lovers on different wavelengths. It’s angry and bitter and boils down to “What turns you on/pisses me off,” which really doesn’t leave much. “Fear To Fear” holds some hope, but again it’s Iyall’s refusal to allow affections to grow that stifles the promise: “Fear to fear/hurt to hurt/nothing works.” Time after time, Iyall proves herself a product of her times and not too happy about it—when she says “I’ve had my fill of everything,’.’ you can’t help but believe her. But that’d be wrong, as the closing track proves.

“I Mean It” is the strongest moment on the platter. More than simply completing the picture, it details a love that by its very nature is transient. Frank Zincavage plays his bass like a lead, his melancholy melody sounding more like a fare-thee-well than a hello, darling. The rhythm section of Peter Woods and drummer John Stench moves unobtrusively, accentuating the flow-like rhythms. This is classic pop. Streisand could cover this.

It’s A Condition is easily one of the best albums I’ve heard all year. It goes beyond art to some form of

truth. It isn t hedonistic hopelessness, it’s explanatory reality focus. This is good stuff indeed, this is what we want. Buy it.

Iman Labadedi

VARIOUS ARTISTS Excepts From The Concerts For The Starving People Of Kampuchea (Atlantic)

I’ve always held the belief that rock ’n’ roll—by its very nature— should keep its nose out of anything to do with starving people, nuclear reactors, earthquake victims, and Las Vegas (although not necessarily in that order).

I’ve never cared for photographs of starving women and children cluttering up album jackets and record labels and, admit it, neither do you.

So when Paul McCartney was approached by the United Nations, why the hell he didn’t just shell out for UNICEF and donate some money to the cause instead of bothering to spearhead these concerts is beyond me.

If McCartney makes (as was recently estimated by various wire services) something in the neighborhood of FIFTY MILLION DOLL-

ARS A YEAR, surely he could’ve done the Kampucheans more good, and in a shorter period of time, by donating, say, a mere two to four weeks of his annual income.

Come to think of it, the highpowered talent here (Wings, Who, Queen) could’ve easily alleviated some of the financial burden singlehandedly without having to resort to the traditionally vile Concert/Album/Film shill.

Think about it: here we have more than a few millionaires specifically staging a series of concerts which otherwise would never have been held to get money out of kids who, let’s face it, wouldn’t otherwise give a Kampuchean the time of day, let alone a couple of his or her hard earned pounds.

If that isn’t a fleece to you, then I’ve got a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge that you might be interested in.

Anyway, the album stinks.

Not all of it, rrnind you, but we’re talking of at least a 60% failure rate here—maybe even as high as 75%, depending on how charitable you fee! at any given moment.

First off, the sound production is flatter than Ellen Foley in the nude.

If you thought that Aerosmith, Yessongs or Metallic K.O. were Sludge City, try listening to the three Pretenders songs that start off Side Two.

The Who side is backdated, out-dated, and self-amputated, Unless you want the 356th version of “See Me, Feel Me” dragged onto vinyl, or a vastly inferior live (and I use the term very loosely) “Baba O’Riley” that doesn’t hold a candle to the The Kids Are Alright soundtrack version, then be my guest. (And the next time you see Pete Townshend, give him this dead horse to flog, will you?)

Just to show that this record is an equal opportunity employer, you get for your money just over two minutes of Elvis Costello—which is such a ludicrous amount of time, it’s almost not worth mentioning.

Queen, on the other hand, get close to seven minutes to echo through a sluggish “Now I’m Here,” which already appears, sing-song and all, on their recent live album. Hey Frederick! Would it’ve been too much to ask for a previously unreleased live version of “Liar” instead? Guess so. (Did someone say “Too Rich To Rock”?)

Big Mac gets the last side to drone out on but, unfortunately, somebody actually wakes him up for a howling version of “Lucille” that almost destroys the death-knell ambience of the side.

Oh yeah, I’d mention the muchvaunted Rockestra, but what’s the point of having John Bonham, Pete “Glue Factory” Townshend and Robert Plant bashing around on stage at the same time IF YOU CAN’T HEAR ANY OF THEM?

Speaking of Percy, he walks away with the album’s Top Honors for an off-the-cuff “Little Sister” with Rockpile that’s almost worth the price of admission—that is, if you’re an oil sheik who digs Led Zeppelin.

Sure I’ve missed a few people but, considering what short shrift they’re given on this album, it’s hard not to.

Want a better deal? Buy Led Zeppelin, Message Of Love, Who’s Next and Revolver or, better still, do as / did: tape your favorite tunes off the radio.

Remember: charity begins at home and, when it comes to albums like this one, it pays to say, “I gave at the office.”

Jeffrey Morgan

GANG OF FOUR Solid Gold (Warner Bros.)

The Gang Of Four, an English band consisting of Andy Gill, guitar; Jon King, vocals; Dave Allen, bass; and Hugo Burnham, drums, released their first album Entertainment! in the U.S. last year to unanimous critical raves and a middling response from the masses—it bombed. Though it was a good album, a great debut, it was too obscure for wide acceptance in this country, and not just because of the Gang’s rigorous philosophy. Taking their cue from the ancient dictum that “the unexamined life is not liveable by man,” the Gang believes that a (re) examination of all our basic precepts is necessary for survival, if not salvation, and so our kneejerk reactions to sex, romance, money, and political/social realities are all grist for their lyric mill. Combining bald rhetoric with hairy abstractions, the group admirably succeeds at making the obvious complaints palatable while at the same time provoking thought (furthermore, to placate the inevitable groans that their chosen name may elicit, the group members have repeatedly asserted that they’re not hard-nosed Marxist— merely socialist, don’t y’know). And their music has a strong, rhythmic base, very danceable. Nothing obscure there. So it wasn’t the lyrics or the post-punk cum new wave sonorities that put people off, but rather Gill’s avant-guitar tonalities and Kind’s exclamatory singingjust the sort of thing that turns the critics on (the jaded brutes) and causes radio program directors to sneer with capitalist disdain. Unfortunately, as you know, if your music isn’t oh the radio in the U.S. it only barely exists. And the Gang Of Four, no elitist wimps, want very much for their messages to get across.

Solid Gold (if this one fails to click, they can call the next one Pure Platinum) shows how. a group with integrity deals with commercial failure. Only the most extreme unrealists would accuse them of selling out, but the things here that differ from the firs^t album, though . no doubt partially evolutionary, seem to come from an effort on the group’s part to suppress some of their wilder impulses. Two of the present cuts, “Outside The Trains Don’t Run On Time” and “He’d Send In The Army,” which comprised the A and B sides of a single released last year after Entertainment!, display the old fuckall panache, but most of the rest of the album seems more carefully considered, the result of a different, more cautious approach (and what would be the point of doing it the same way all over again one more time?). Not that they’ve set out to re-invent heavy metal, but the sound is fuller and often Gill now falls in step, giving the music a monolithic, more conventional rock sound. And King is singing better now, less uptight, more willing to wail.

The lyric concerns have shifted somewhat too—the political/social theorizing/moralizing is still there but there’s more frustration, bitterness, and anxiety now. The Gang’s idealism has come of age. “Paralysed” sets the tone—“my ambition’s come to nothing/what I wanted now seems just a waste of time/can’t make out what has gone wrong/(Bitterly) 1 was good at what I did...” The despair peaks on “In The Ditch,” an anthem for agoraphobics, “get down, down to the floor/under the table with the radio on/whatever you do stay calm!/...the door is locked/I feel safe beyond the cares of the world.” Alarmist boogie for paranoid people? Naw, just ironic angst for malcontents...

There’s more than just despair here. “A Hole In The Wallet” is instrumentally fine, r’n’b more unreconstructed that the Gang has done before, but the lyrics are a bit stiff, with the exception of one of the neatest couplets on the album—. “Why work for love if it shows no profit?/you only earn emotional losses.” Nods to America are made on “Cheeseburger” and The Republic,” the former proclaiming “no classes in the U.S.A./improve yourself! the choice is yours” while Devo-esque voices sing sarcastic “yeah yeah yeah”s. The army is dealt with on the aforementioned “Army,” right-wing mentality on the aforementioned “Trains,” and Gill and King analyze their need to analyze on “Why Theory?”

If all this sounds tedious (and without the music it surely can), it should be said, clearly, that there isn’t a dull cut on the album, not a cut that doesn’t bomp satisfyingly and reward repeated listening.

Despite the tightening of their approach, the group’s still one of the best, most exciting unembraced-bythe-public bands around. And now the music is easier to listen to, so if you found Entertainment!... harsh... (if you found it at all) I heartily (kindly, cajolingly) recommend you try the new improved Gang Of Four, offer limited, void where prohibited, satisfaction...well, I can’t make any promises. But I can say it’s worth a try.

Richard C. Walls

ROBERT FRIPP The League Of Gentlemen (Polydor)

Didja ever notice how precisely Robert Fripp’s clothes fit him? Every album cover photo of Fripp that slides through customs—even on this new League Of Gentlemen, where he’s rather raffishly donned a sleeveless undershirt to confront a broiling N..C. July—shows Mr. Fripp’s garments fitted to his graduate-studied morphology with the airbrushed exactitude of the finest London tailors. 90 degrees in the shade of Manhattan manhole covers, and'Fripp’s got that trim little belt threaded through the (tape?) loops of his freshly-pressed white duck trousers with a precision that would make a grown David Byrne— the former champ of sartorial hyper-preppiness—shed Izod Lacoste tears.

Which may be a hitting-belowthe-belt (so to speak) method of introducing a review of League Of Gentlemen, as Robert Fripp has politely demanded, in his own published music criticism, a return to treating a work of art as an objective reality, independent of the (potentially messy) humanity of its creator. In other words, if this were a properly Frippertonic review, I’d confine myself to discussion of the sounds planted in the grooves of the disc, maybe I wouldn’t even mention that said sounds issued from a human brain, let alone nitpick the wardrobe attached to the body attached to the brain.

But each time I spin League Oj Gentlemen, I find the same erudition and precision and utter tastefulness in Robert Fripp’s music that I’ve observed in his careful dress, I keep flashing on all those mirror images of a very human compulsiveness that exists somewhere outside the “new critics,” mania for objective art. And since I’m not handy enough to Fripp at the moment to obey my own irrational compulsion—to get Bob down and tickle him just enough to disturb the fearful symmetry of his clothes one silly iota—I’m gonna have to go to work on him with the mere words at my disposal.

But relax. Bob, if you’ll allow me to gofor the simplicity of your League Of Gentlemen concept (a four-person “rock band” playing pop-like tunes well-embraced over a long 1980 world tour).

And it happened that the resultant studio validation of the concept makes League Of Gentlemen Robert Fripp’s most accessible (to us average subjective types) record in many a season. The album highlights are instrumentals like “Inductive Resonance” and “Cognitive Dissonance” (the latter not the Paul Revere song of the same title), tunes featuring guitarist Fripp and organist Barry Andrews noodling away at their instruments with quiet fury, sometimes so precisely coordinated that the axes shift and exchange their respective sounds, like when you listen to Sonny & Cher too long and you can’t tell which voice is which unless you (objectively) concentrate. Nor can I detect the electronic seams in League Of Gentlemen-, a lot of the songs sound tape-looped, but I can’t decide whether they really are, or whether Fripp taught Andrews and bassist Sara Lee and drummers Johnny Too-Bad and Kevin Wilkinson to play along with the tapelooped windmills of his mind at all times (not an unlikely possibility, given Fripp’s disciplined search for musical reality).

There are also a number of instances on League Of Gentlemen of garden-variety found-lyrics stuff —snatches of talk shows, Fripp’s old pals the Roches (I think, therefore it is them) reading droller-than-droll Fripp coinages, overheard orgasms (some people really know how to get off get off off on tape loops)—all the bright things that amke up Brian Eno’s clever days. Fripp himself shows even more encouraging signs of life on League Of Gentlemen by including bits of his ostensible idol J.G. Bennett blathering on about Gurdjieff, with the pieces chopped up and rearranged to make that dogma sound as pretentiously silly as we already figured.

Oh yeah, League Of Gentlemen features plenty of great dance music, for dancing so rooted and precise and controlled you won’t even get your clothes mussed... Objectively speaking, I think I’m beginning to get your point, Mr. Fripp, and I’m certain I’ll be putting your new album on my stereo for many an objective occasion to come, like say (for starters) typing this review. Fair enough?

Here we go loop-de-loop...

Richard Riegel

JOHN CALE Honi Soit.

(A&M)

When John Cale left the Velvet Underground for ever more mysterious sojourns, the theme he took with him was one of violence. Torturous threats and painful inflictions seemed to hang over all his subsequent work. You could not glance at his album covers without feeling their omniscient terrors: Cale’s cadaverous mask (Vintage Violence); his pallid complexion (Fear) ; C.ale in bondage (Helen Of Troy); Cale, blindfolded, facing the firing squard (Animal Justice). His music was frightfully savage, especially on Fear and Slow Dazzle—it was as if the classicist in him had gone mad, slicing away at his viola just to see at what point the sawdust would fly.

Perhaps because of this innate madness, Cale has had more confused failures than coherent triumphs throughout his career. Where he has been most successful (Vintage Violence or Paris 1919) is in summoning forth a period, an era wherein the mood is sustained as an enclosed narrative.

Once again on Honi Soit— from the opening trumpet blast of “Dead Or Alive” to the final pounding of the drums on “Magic & Lies”— Cale evokes the epochal—this time as a series of battles, as a pure declaration of war. Like Lou Reed’s Street Hassle, it’s a work on which the artist finally reveals himself, concealing his tracks yet at the same time blowing his cover. Just as “I Wanna Be Black” offers Reed’s version of rock ’n’ roll’s hidden passion, so does the scope of Honi Soit illuminate Cale’s inner vision of rock as hand-to-hand combat. If the title Vintage Violence was ironic, that irony finally culminates on cuts such as “Russian Roulette,” with Cale bellowing in the bloody trenches of his own personal D-Day.

War, however, hasn’t merely become Cale’s blatant metaphor (i.e., “Fighter Pilot” with background vocals by the Bomberettes); the music, too, bears out the impact of his battle scars. Consistently the inner rumblings of the songs clash, surge forth, and then take a spiraling nosedive toward hazardous terrain. There’s always the ineluctable explosion after the crash—and always Cale stumbling forth from the debris.

Nowhere is this more evident than on “Wilson Joliet,” the album’s most challenging cut. Here, Cale screams in the midst of combat to remind himself that he’s still alive. Crawling through the muck, sweat streaking his mud-caked face, he wrenches from his gut what may be a melody, shouted with all the bitterness of a soldier who has not only tasted defeat but who knows the loss of having to return home, unable to share his defeat with anyone but other vanquished soldiers.

Although the music on Honi Soit is tough enough for Red West to pick his teeth with, its imagery is thoughtfully, almost gently, composed. Often Cale aims for the poetic level of Patti Smith’s Horses, which he once oversaw like some cool third-eye of primitivism. (“We are shuffled like a pack of cards in the dead of night,” Cale sings as if his life depended on it, “Like lovers below Bataan, below the senses, ’cause the senses smell of tears.”) Yet, all the songs remain built upon a teeth-gritting hysteria, a recognition that, if the artillery hits, the poet’s words are merely a voice in the rubble.

Most importantly, though, Honi Soit isn’t just about the sound of war or the majestic glory of bombs blasting away; it’s an expression of the sensation of being trapped by those bombs: the heroic assertion of the sad fact that all good soldiers die alone.

Robert A. Hull

IS THERE LIFE AFTER MEATLOAF ? ?

JIM STEINMAN

BAD FOR OOOD (CLEVELAND INTERNATIONAL)

BV THE MAD PECK $ ROBOT A. HULL

GUESS WHAT,DR. OLDIE? CAPTAIN CARVEL'S SPECIAL THIS WEEK IS AN ICE CREAM CAKE IN THE SHAPE OF A MEATLOAF.

COINCIDENCE! JIM STEINMAN, THE BRAINS BEHIND "BAT OUT OF HELL; HAS ONLY RECENTLY MADE HIS OWN VINYL VOCAL DEBUT, AND ONCE AGAIN HE'S CHOSEN THE IFFY REALM OF THE ROCK MUSICAL.

MEANWHILE, IN A WAREHOUSE JUST OUTSIDE NEW JERSEY..

NO FOOLIN'SARGE, IF WE DON'T THINK FAST WE'RE GONNA END UP EATING ALL THESE STEINMAN LPi. THE KIDS JUST WONT BITE 'CAUSE IT'S GOT NO MEATLOAF

LET'S SEE, WE ALREADY THREW IN A BONUS SINGLE. I'VE GOT IT ! WE'LL GIVE AWAY A FREE r MEATLOAF JOKE BOOK =; TO THE FIRST 200,000 ii SUCKERS

“BAD FOR GOOD" OFFERS SOME DRAMATIC MUSHTHAT PROVES JIM IS A DETERMINED S SHLOCKMEISTER. THE OBVIOUS HIT’DANCE k IN MV PANTS" FEATURES AHORNEY DIALOGUE A LA "PARADISE BY THE DASHBOARD LIGHT" BEST OF ALL, THERE'S A GENUINELY FUNNY PARODY Of JIM MORRISON'S "THE END" J AND "HORSE LATITUDES" ALL ABOUT A KID WHO KILLS WITH HIS GUITAR

THIS IS PHIL RIZ2UT0 FOR THE MONEY TREE. FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY, WE'RE OFFERING A FREE JIM STEINMAN ALBUM WITH EVERY SYOO,000 LOAN

HERE'S ONE SARGE. WHY DID THE MEATLOAF PAINT ITS r DING-DONG RED ?

SOME COULD HIDE IN THE STRAWBERRY PATCH, OF COURSE! WE'LL HAVE TO DO A LOT BETTER THAN THAT IF WE'RE GONNA , FILL A WHOLE BOOK 1 m WITH MEATLOAF GAGS.

DEADKENNEDYS Fresh Frnit For Rotting Vegetables (IRS)

CAROL HENSEL Dancersize (Vintage)

Everything but everything in this mad, mod world of ours is changing at a breakneck pace. Wristwatches calculate everything from slugging pet, to ovulation. Eggs can be scrambled without cracking the shell. And in what can only be called the Eighth Wonder of today’s world, man can now answer his telephone through his TV set.

Is if any wonder, then, that the Pop Scene is advancing faster than Billy Altman with a new pair of scissors? After all, music comes from the soul (I think, or maybe The left elbow) and in these days of long yellow lights and the seedless cupcake, we all need fast souls.

Which brings us to one of the most advanced combos extant, the Dead Kennedys. With a sly ambiguity bordering on futuristic, these daddyo cats have altered the very form of the long-playing record. That’s right, they’ve ash-canned the traditional side one/side two approach in favor of a brilliant “face up”/“face down” format. Then, taking it all yet another great leap forward, the DKs perform tunes so proudly equal that even the most gifted listener cannot tell which side is playing! How novel, how daringly 1984!

The single most impressive track is definitely either “Kill The Poor” or “California Uber Allies.” With an anguished vocal performance bordering on bedwetting, singer Jello Biafra recklessly rhymes neutron bomb with Jane Fonda and courteously invites his audience to “jog for the master race.” This is not mere music, this is climate control!

Other nest stains on the tree of enlightenment include a sterling tin updating of the Blues Magoos legend singularly entitled “Let’s Lynch The Landlord” or “Stealing People’s Mail”; the waves of haunting cupid traffic hinted at in the unique “Drug Me” or ‘ill In The Head”; and the one-in-a-million, never to be duplicated “Forward To Death” or “I Kill'Children.” A true dawg trash exorcism.

Speaking of excersizing, newcomer Carol Hensel’s Dancercise LP touches on a mimimalistic approach that can rightfully be called Wimp Dub. As her rhythm-heavy band bravely takes on a conceptual walk off a short pier with a long pole, Carol—in a sing/talk style not unlike early Jim Stafford—recites her opaque lyrics (“touch right/ touch left/lunge to the floor”) in a detached manner similar to Blondie’s “Rapture.”

Having anticipated the current dance-rock modernism of such acts as the Talking Heads, Spandau Ballet and the Mandrell Sisters, Hensel’s aerobic rhumbas virtually define the genre. “I Go To Rio,” for example, builds gradually on a jet stream meow factor of Big Beats until the musicians suddenly drop out, leaving Carol alone in the mix wailing “snap your fingers/keep it loose/slap your knees/ready—hip twist/jump/hop/continue!” Continue... e at your heart out, Bruce.

Ms. “Pre” Hensel is no elitist either. Amazing as it may seem, every song on this album sounds like a potential hit. From the heartrending dooby doos of “What A Fool Believes” to the lovely, if greasy, ballad “Summer Nights,” all her tunes feature big mahooga hooks and an irresistable beat. It’s no exaggeration when I say she could be the next Sugarhill Gang.

Although it seems unlikely that the Cleveland Songbird could ever top herself, she does just that in the final cut. Joined by second vocalist Tommy Chris, she slips easily into the currently popular Duet Syndrome to deliver a tune she calls “Just The Way You Are”:

She: Let’s cool it down

He: Don’t go changing...

She: Get ready with the right leg

He: To try and please me...

She: Turn it over/legs apart!

With unforgettable material like that, is it any wonder that Dancersize is *72 with a white cross on the Billboard chart?

Lyrics enclosed in both albums.

Rick Johnson

LEON REDBONE From Branch To Branch (Emerald City) JORMA KAUKONEN Barbecue King (RCA)

Shrouded in the mists of eternity somewhere before last Thursday, there was a time when everyone, wondered just who Leon Redbone really was. Now, of course, it hardly matters whether he’s the same guy as Tonio K., or an Armenian who used to hang out in the pool halls of Toronto, or another candidate. I say the best way to figure out who he is is to look at what he wants. Think about those stuck-in-amber tempos, those wheezy vocals, the what-rock&-roli? repertoire, the senile contentment—oops, gave it away. Yes, behind those glasses and that mustache, Leon Redbone wants to be 94 V2 years old for the next couple of decades—and there’s another musician whose ambitions are, shall we say, suspiciously similar: Jorma Kaukonen.

True, Kaukonen has twiddled his digits in the rock ’n’ roll style, and he still remembers how to set his guitar distortion so it induces acid flashbacks. But when he stepped out of the Jefferson Airplane to form Hot Tuna, it was obvious that his real ambition was to be the Reverend Gary Davis, your basic umpteengenarian revere-me-’fo’-Ikick-off blues legend. Apparently it hasn’t occurred to Jorma that Davis’ experience was a little more important than his fingerpicking style, so Jorma dutifully plunked away’ trying to get geriatric fast (well, slow too). Electric, acoustic, what’s the diff?

But that’s not the only reason I think he’s Leon Redbone. Much as they try to disguise it—probably through speeding up a tape somewhere—they’ve both got the same voice, which is, in its way, a marvel; a monotone that can change notes. Both Redbone and Kaukonen can produce actual melodies which rise and fall without a hint of emotional resonance. Compared to the subtleties of the old bluesmen, whose every chortle and sigh serves a purpose, these young canesnappers have gone literally beyond subtlety. On the downhill side.

Like your uncle who keeps forgetting that you’ve already heard the same story 42 times, Redbone/Kaukonen (why try to hide it?) has mastered senile album programming. Kaukonen: a token rocker a la Chuck Berry (hmmm, he’s getting on, too); a folk-rock number o'r two, and a handful of plunkers. Redbone: old songs made to sound older and slower than they were to begin with, turned ugly and alien. Kaukonen sings “Love Is Strange” like a purely theoretical proposition; Redbone croaks “A HotTime In The Old Town Tonight” as if that means he’s gonna sneak some Ovaltine into his warm milk.

The thing is, Redbone/Kaukonen may^be on to something. The baby boom’s over, that big ol’ demographic bulge is shifting towards the golden years, even the President is more than a little creaky, and these two albums are poised for the rockin’ chair generation. Sooner or later, they suggest, geezer chic will be upon us: hot water bottles instead of hot tubs, Bromo instead of Perrier, wrinkles instead of rouge. After that, everything anyone cared about will be a thing of the past.

Jon Pareles