ROCKIN’ PALADINS TO THE PUNK VESPIARY

ROCKIN’ PALADINS TO THE PUNK VESPIARY

RECORDS

by Joe (Frottage) Fembacher

RAMONES

Pleasant Dreams

Sire

Like no other band from those halcyon days of nouveau punkdom, the Ramones were essential, much I needed spirits. Phantasms who took the stage with a smirk, a shrug of the shoulders, and a perfect mastery of the rhythms of the moment, their rockin’ wraiths somehow always managed to reflect back to appreciative audiences all the growing pangs of changing tastes and attitudes. And it was that cachinnating spirit which made them the rock ’n’ roll paladins to an adolescent punk vespiary as it slowly moiled its way into the consciousness of the latter 70’s.

Along the way, the Ramones tenaciously kept alive one of their most important aspects of the “new” punk sound—with their churning stun-chords firmly locked into the days of psychedelia (the root of all punk music, no matter how it mutates and meanders), they reaffirmed every step of their blitzkrieg boppin’ way that, in spite of any and all labels\ tagged onto sounds at certain mO|ments in history, it’s always fundamentally nothing more than a permutation of pop music. (Of course, whenever you say something’s pop music, loads of people cringe in disgust; they have no room for such sentimental saccharinity in their dark and gloomy lives—or so they’d like you to believe. So few wanted to recognize that the Ramones were nothing more, and nothing less, than a loud pop band, and no difference in essence than,' say, Abba, Leif Garrett, or the Beatles.)

With End Of The Century, the band finally decided it was time to get down to brass tacks and actually be the pop band everyone hadn’t mistaken them for previously, especially since the transition had taken place between the hardcore punk gyrations and what the business wanted to call new wave. The land was rife with pop bands bitching about the spoony inevitability of lost and found romance, the inability to get laid and the haze of existential loneliness. It was a time when nova-bum velocity was being replaced with slug-like conceptuality and “new” rock intellectualism. A time when the beat left the streets and wafted into the closets of dough-faced collegiate punk plebes who wanted desperately to get their chicken-fingered claws on all the collectibles and punkephrenalia that surrounded all this hoo-hah. A time of irksome exploitation.

And though the Ramones didn’t fare well on End Of The CerUury, and many were beginning to write them off as dessicated funsters who’d gotten far too serious for their own good, the group, undaunted, took a fleering glance back at their mistakes and gave forth one of the first pleasant dreams of the 80’s.

In an age when there supposedly could be no more masterpieces, Pleasant Dreams is a masterpiece; a pop pogrom that leaves little doubt as to not only the Ramones’ rockin’ resiliency, but also their refreshing understanding of just how punk music should've progressed irv content, form and general remarkableness. The biggest difference between End of The Century and Pleasant preams is probably the understanding that producer Graham Gouldman brings to these songs. On Century, the Ramones fell innocent victim to the doldrums of Phil Spector’s Hadean production values, well suited for the Crystals or Ronettes but not the Ramones. Let’s face it—suburban surf music has little to do with the inbred funk of the inner city. Gouldman’s production is an exercise in understatement, and reflects the grasp of one of the basic tenets of pop music—j.e., never clutter up that which is important to the lyric, for it is the lead voice and the harmony that creates the textures of pop. And so the vocals are right up front, the rhythms of the guitars are woven in and out at just the proper instances, and the words are understandable short stories exploring the Ramones’ eyevfew of the world.

While all the songs here attain a certain individual respectability, the jams are really kicked out on “She’s A Sensation,” a song the likes of which Greg Kihn and Bram Tchaikovsky have been struggling to write since they began popadelicizing, and “7-11,” an ode to all those pert young nubiles who cruise the video games for techni-lust and all its accompanying inebriation.

So next time you’re hangin’ ten at the local video emporium—the latest and greatest teen phenomenon since the malt shop—ogling the scenery, sniffing the bike seats, or just crackin’ your wrists in the fury of Space Invader angst, just think about the Ramones and this album, and think what their next one will be like. Perhaps it’ll be a concept album about suburbia, perhaps a concept album about video games, perhaps it’ll be another excursion into Ramoneamania. Perhaps another Pleasant Dream about rock ‘n’ roll’s future.

FOREIGNER

4

(Atlantic)

This is what? These guys’ second or third LP since Mick Jones publicly declared F’gner ain’t dinosaurs and that they were really starting to get, ex, involved with “the new music scene.” Not that the fabled yob squad behind “Hot Blooded” had gone “punk,” mind you, but the guys didn’t want to be left holding the dry ice in case New Wave did happen to seize the day.

But now it’s 1981 and everybody, I mean everybody—“ESP Management” and the guys at Billboard and Warner Communications and everyone who knows, knows punk didn’t happen. So what’s old M.J. to do with' his endorsement for the New Age? Stuff it like Chicago, who dedicated one whole album “to the Revolution” back in ’69? Hell no! Foreigner acts as if ’77-’79 NEVER EVEN HAPPENED! The primo Retro move of all time! The boot-wearing fairies of the New Romanticism have revamped disco, V. Halen and Judas P. have reinvigorated H-Metal, so all’s right again out in the broad gutland of this great nation! Mick joins his compatriots in proclaiming the eternal, unbending Forever of AOR! Mid-70’s music, long may its flag wave o’er the hunky home of the bland.

To celebrate, Foreigner give out with Four, a tidy program that literally breeds familiarity: recycled Stones (“Night Life”), reforged Deep Purple (“Don’t Let Go”), obligatory balladry (“Waiting For A Girl Like You”), even vintage Fgner itself (“I’m Gonna Win”).

There is a refreshing change-ofpace piece of pop (“Luanne”); but that’s not what Four here is all about. It’s all good gray unadorned stuff, unflashy and faceless, and it reassures everyone who maybe was getting a little worried that something might, er, um, change. It won’t, and FM radio can,breathe easy at last; knowing, finally, just what the 80’s will be like.

Gene Sculatti

YOKO ONO Season Of Glass (Geffen)

Yoko Ono’s first post-John album has been out a month or so as 1 write this, but you’d never know that from tuning into your local radio outlet. No, ever' since Double Fantasy appeared, the stations hereabouts have marched systematically through that album, cut-by-every-' other-cut, and have pulled off one John Lennon song after another for successive airplay, as they’ve just as carefully avoided each of the Yoko Ono cuts, allowing them to sink further into that discographied wasteland reserved for “Beatlesrelated” novelty sides.

So if you’ve listened faithfully to your radio for the past few seasons of glass, you certainly haven’t heard that Yoko Ono’s disco-inflammable,, multilingual-orgasmic “Kiss Kiss Kiss” is probably the best cut on Double Fantasy. Besides, this same song was the flip of the “Starting Over” single, which means John was a fan of “Kiss Kiss Kiss” in his lifetime, which means that it’s perfectly okay with John if you push the record now, radio people. But John’s own “Watching The Wheels” got the tipsheet nod as the programmable hit of the moment. Seems as though a lot of people out there still want Yoko Ono to walk a step or two behind her dead husband, as though she came from prewar Japan or some other such unliberated place.

Which makes Yoko Ono’s new Season Of Glass even more of a pop gamble than it already is, coming at us as the first Lennon-Onp album product derived from the tragedy of John’s murder. Yoko Ono has gone out of her way toward reconciliation on Season Of Glass, reconciliation not even as much with the killer(s) of her husband, as with the radiolistening/record-buying public in general. This album should come as a gently revelatory shock to anyone who still believes that the typical Yoko Ono record is all undifferentiated primal-scream caterwaulings, designed to rip “intelligently-chosen stereo components” to shreds.

Season Of Glass is perhaps Yoko Ono’s most accessible recording ever. It’s 14 cuts of soft, subtlytwisted, rock-flavored conventional pop music—conventionality which may derive as much from the album’s musicians, the best N.Y. studio types (Earl Slick et al.) money can buy, and from the coproducer, Phil "The Old Ways Are Best” Spector, as from Ono’s own intentions—but either way, the net effect is one easily approachable album, one which should bring Yoko Ono into millions of American family rooms (Just The Way John Wanted).

For all its potential accessibility, the record also achieves the difficult (because simultaneous) task of making its mark artistically. Thanks to Yoko Ono, Season Of Glass is not a concept album about John Lennon’s murder. Many of the songs were already composed before his death, and they commemorate John all the more humanly because they speak of the uncertainties always present in love, even love as intense as John’s and Yoko’s—“1 wondered if we could/ Ever be” sings Yoko, with her customary haiku-like pithiness, in “Mindweaver,” and you realize that what Mark Chapman finally shot down were all the potential, if transitory, consummations inherent in those uncertainties.

Season Of Glass is not without its more dramatic reminders of the assassination —John’s bloodstreaked eyeglasses on the cover, the startling gunshot sounds just before “No, No, No,” and Sean Ono Lennon’s heartwrenching anecdote about a story that “can end anywhere”—but these jolts can almost be taken as severely blackhumored parodies of the media luridness attending John’s death. The National Enquirer may have been first on the stands with their sickening John-on-the-morgue-slab cover photo, but only a great man’s grieving widow can display his bloody glasses to the ravenous public.

But still, it’s the daily reality of t|ie living John Lennon we should keep with us for good, and Yoko Ono provides many incisive glimpses of the real John throughout the LP. As in “No, No, No,” where the Yokoesque protagonist is (more impatiently than coyly)' resisting a quickfuck seduction: “Let me take my pants off!” snarls Yoko, and the implications that even the Head Beatle must (not have gotten to) stand naked sometimes, enhance his memory that much more glowingly.

Elsewhere on Season Of Glass, Yoko Ono continues her pursuit of the life she’s always had to forge for herself, all through her bizarre odyssey across the universe of nations and artistries she’s known (Yoko was already an adult living in the U.S. before John picked up his first guitar.). For all her stylistic openness here, Yoko has plenty of provocative twists planted throughout the off-the-cuff surrealism of her lyrics, as in the dada of “Dogtown” (“One day let’s be a pair of trees”), or on the many levels of “Toyboat” (“The boat that reached my shore was a toyboat”). Yoko Ono’s continuing collisions with life, reported to us in that earnest little soprano, almost Nancy Sinatratarty in its precocious sexiness. I just hope radio accepts Yoko at last.

Anyway, the Fab Four still exist, and so do you.

Richard Riegel

VILLAGE PEOPLE Renaissance (RCA)

What is this? The Village AntPeople? Spandau Village Ballet? How sad that the re-vamped V.P.s (read: Jacques Morali) would try to “cash” in on the new “romantic” look—a trend that’s all dolled up with no place to go. Maybe the band would have been better off going country (Urban Cowpeople?), or even ska (Pork Pie Village?). But, then again, neither of these would have implied such a GRAND STATEMENT. Could it be that this new poof look is actually the Visage People’s politicized, pithy way of saying that the butch look is finally finis? Perhaps it’s their odd way of expressing deep concern over the imperialist oppression caused by masculine stereotypes and in defiant reaction they've' decided to champion a return to swish-chic (remember glitter?). Or maybe they’re simply under the insane delusions that drag queens are about to become the next big thing and this is their way of warming up. (If so, Jobriath, call your agent.)

Whatever their motive, surely they could have found a more flattering way of getting the message across than forcing former leather man Glenn Hughes to dress up in what looks like Leonardo Da Vinci’s hand-me-downs. (Facially he now looks like Victor Buono with hives.) Likewise, ex-construction worker David Hodo either has chicken pox or some ' over-ambitious makeup person went berserk with the “beauty” mark pen. And why didn’t anyone bother to tell Felipe Rose that he needn't have trashed his entire Indian outfit since absolutely everyone in the civilized world knows that modest Tonto garb is perfectly acceptable in the new romantic “aesthetic.”

In terms of such pedestrian matters as music, the only interesting aspect here is that it took eight entire beings to write each and every song. “Action Man” sounds like a sure-fire Top 40 rock-disco hit —probably because one of its hooks has already made it up there under the name “Whip It” by Devo. On the positive side, the band correctly assume you’ll never be able to sit through the entire record without a break (after all, it does consume ah entire 30 minutes—eight minutes longer than their debut), so they include commercials. Those lucky four or five of you who raced out to see their film, Can’tStop The Music, will doubtlessly remember that they used a similar trick there, featuring suspiciously lingering attention on Baskin-Robbins ice cream. Here the village idiots offer a jingle for Big Macs, which may be witty but it’s probably a commercial faux pas—it would have been far more timely to serenade Chicken McNuggets. There’s also a filfty song called “Diet.” which could very well turn up as a late night TV ad for the National Nutrition Council if someone at RCA does their job right. Making it a food fetish trilogy is something called “Food Fight” which is their attempt at all-out punk. (One supposes Morali’s idea of the ultimate Sex Pistol is John Belushi.) The rest is all schlocky pop-rock-disco sung by recent addition Ray Simpson (an OK singer who should find himself a new gig).

The music may be duller than such former farces as “Macho Man,” but the new physical style actually makes their “conceptual” thrust somewhat less offensive. When last we left the Village People, they were busy selling out gay images to an unsuspecting straight public by keeping everything at a masturbatory, cartoon level, letting their love speak its true name only to those who could already read the signs. Their movie, in fact, was so antiseptic that it made it seem as if homosexuals don’t really even exist, but instead are just some in-joke notion dreamed up by zany New Yorkers. Here they’ve even gotten rid of the cartoon, running for cover under someone else’s “style.” As a “concept” they now barely exist. Which is fine. From here on, that will simply make them all the easier to ignore.

Jim Farber

BLUE OYSTER CULT Fire Of Unknown Origin

_(Columbia)_

The Cult continues to ride out its techno-flash mastery of AOR styles in its post-Pearlman drive to 1984. The Pearlman/Meltzer mythmaking axis provided an image/sound framework of heavy metal/Byrds that made the band mindlessly relentless and rhetorically dazzling at the same time. When the Pearlman/Krugman production team assembled its AOR-formula masterpiece on Agents Of Fortune and Spectres, a lot of people started saying the Cult had deserted its heavy metal acceptability) for the more sinister radio sellout approach.

Not so. Though it’s been a shade downhill since Spectres, the long term project has been regrooved a la Star Wars to combine the metallic tiffing with the poetically related sci-fi imagery in a new way. Almost like going from porno films to Cinerama! As the red hot licks of Cultosaurus Erectus indicated, the imagery doesn’t have to have anything directly to do with the songs on the record, long as it looks good. Here we get these oysterbearing third eye cabalistic Moonies from Planet X and in the title track they took my baby away to a melodic yet bludgeoning riff that is as art rockingly metal as their heavy ever got. Here’s producer Martin “Headmaster” Birch fresh from a blood-curdling Iron Maiden LP revving the boys up to show some ghost of Deep Purple or Uriah Heep off the stage as in the old days.

Once the cover theme’s disposed of (first tune on the record) the band stretches out in to Steve Miller territory with “Burnin’ For You,” then, in what could get the Whopper award for the year, crosses the Moody Blues and Eno for “Veteran Of The Psychic Wars,” which if you think about it long enough might have something to do with the cover too.

“Sole Survivor” is a good song about the last person on earth escaping from alien starships under the cover of great feedback guitar lines. Then comes the track you’ve been waiting for, “Heavy Metal: The Black And The Silver,” with screeching Hendrix rifforamas and images like “iron sun” and “river of fire.” (See, they’re still heavy metal.) Good wrestling preliminary pits them against Iron Maiden, or maybe as a tag team with Birch as the manager wielding that paddle from the back of the Maiden LP.

Best track on the record: “Joan Crawford.” Acoustic piano intro, hard rock strut, apocalyptic imagery and the ultimate terror chorus: JOAN CRAWFORD HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE. Better than Hitchcock! Better than Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman! Wait a minute, my phone’s ringing. “Listen, do the Cult and Kim Carnes together and we can bill it as the remake of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? OK?”

John Swenson

DAVID JOHANSEN Here Comes The Night

_(Blue Sky)_

Today I’m on jury duty—literally as well as metaphorically—and the people of the great state of New York are, quite reasonably, I think, paying me $12 a day while I deliberate the knotty case of David Johansen. The question before me today is not whether Here Comes The Night, Johansen’s third solo LP, is good or not—it is very good— but whether you will buy it and David will get the major national attention he has deserved for so long.

As I graze in the great cow pasture of justice known as the jury assembly room I have ample time to consider the plaudits: only last week the New York Times galled Johansen one of the five bgst male vocalists in rock (my own number is smaller). His raffish charm, Stubbsian (as opposed tQ, say, Ruffinish) grit, and New York wit have been winning friends and influencing people since he first charged onto the field nine years ago in the garish colors of the band he affectionately calls “my old alma mater,” the New York Dolls. (Hmmm...four ‘New York’s in two paragraphs... maybe there’s a lesson on this, but I hope not.)

So why have his previous solo albums drawn critical cavils and kvetches? Because though the Dolls’ two records were not good records, the Dolls were wonderful regardless and they captured a moment, shooting off ideological sparks in a way that the straightforward efforts of a man commited to a career as an entertainer can’t at first. Besides, David’s incandescent, faith restoring live performances can and do recall the tumult and the shouting, the imaginary glory of the bad old days. The gulf between can and can’t, between past and present has made for difficulties.

The first album was the subject of much learned debate concerning expectations, production, and players but for me, four years later, it’s still thrilling—particularly "Donna” and “Frenchette” (N.Y.’s own “Stairway To Heaven” but better because it’s about something). On the second LP he was still doing the same stuff: writing good songs and singing them well, but the cover was a shot by Avedon and the title was “In Style” so obviously, it was assumed he’d sold his ass to the Interview/W crew.

Here Comes The Night will probably inspire the same sort of qualms in folks who scrutinize the credits before they listen, since David has had the termerity to hire Styx’s knobmeister Barry Mraz as, co-producer. I have a few reservations myself about techniques which are notably Stygian: touches of heavy echb on David’s voice as at the end of the otherwise excellent “She Loves Strangers,” and more organ than is healthy anywhere this side of Booker T, but the ensemble vocals have never been recorded better and drummer Tony Machine sounds as good as he really is (try the title cut for proof), so I’m satisfied.

The big news here is the collaboration (made in r&r heaven) between Johansen and South African guitarist/writer/singer Blondie Chaplin (Flame to Beach Boys to solo if you’re doing the family tree). Co-writer of more than half the songs, backup vocalist on most, and superbly understated guitarist throughout, Chaplin constructs a careful platform from which David’s heart and theatrically shine. “Bohemian Love Pad,” the best Fugs song in ten years, features a tiny guitar solo and Beach Boys harmonies at the end that set off the song’s drive and merry irony perfectly. Ditto the Caribbean lilt of “Rollin’ Job” with more fine chorus and guitar work from Blondie. In fact everything from the fierce guitars of “My Obsession” to the plaintive harp of “Heart Of Gold” skillfully conspires to serve the songs and the songs serve the sage of Staten Island very well indeed. And though David has shamelessly stolen titles, he’s lived up to the challenge: he’s made “Here Comes The Night” a good song for the third time, “Suspicion” and “My Obsession” for the second time, and he’s made “Heart Of Gold” a great song for the first time.

Help make David Johansen the next Bob Seger. He’ll live up to that challenge better than Bob. Case dismissed.

Jeff Nesin

JOE JACKSON’S JUMPIN’ JIVE (A&M)

Jumpin’ Jive is about a musician with an attitude messing with music that is about style.

Talent doesn’t really enter into it. Neither does intent. Personality does and doesn’t.

Let’s try it this way: De Niro has style, Gere has an attitude; Daffy Duck has style, Donald Duck has an attitude; David Mamet has style, Neil Simon has an attitude; Dennis Eckersley has style, Jim Palmer has an attitude.

As career detours go, this fourth LP by Joe Jackson goes with a certain amount of pep. The jivey, slangy hybrid of jazz, blues and pop executed by the likes of Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan in the 1940s is one of rock ’n’ roll’s most overlooked antecedents (you can hear how it lead to Chuck Berry, the Coasters, Fats Domino, Huey Smith, etc.). People should know this stuff.

After all, modes of swing have been batted at from the right (country) side of the plate courtesy of such hip exponents as Merle Haggard, Commander Cody and Asleep At The Wheel. We urbans deserve equal time. Calloway did more than “Minnie The Moocher,” “Reefer Man” and occasional cameo shots in Betty Boop cartoons. Jordan is one of the true unacknowledged pioneers (and too often confused with the guy suffering from ennui in Gigi).

And who under 30 remembers Symphony Sid, besides the suicidal kid in Brett Singer’s The Petting Zoo? (key passage: “Sid played the music of people who’d died too young. Charlie Parker. Billie Holliday. Bunny Berrigan. I understood and didn’t understand Jake’s attachment to a radio program whose passing belonged to an era he had never known.”)

A song-oriented (best tunes: “It’s Different For Girls,” “Happy Loving Couples”) type who projects his individuality more through lyric and melody than through performance, J.J. is out of his waters here. Jumpin’ jive is a performanceoriented form—it’s all in the contagious enthusiasm of the singer, the bounce in the playing. Like the earliest R’n’R, you might say.

Genuinely fond of this genre Jackson may be, but he makes it all seem like a stiff kind of fun; his nervous vocal energy doesn’t correspond with the songs’ footloose riffery. He ain’t much of a scatter. He’s doing the cool cat jargon by rote.

He doesn’t connect jive with what he’s been up to in his own career. Unless “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby” can be compared as romantic bafflement with “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” Unless you count the shoes on the cover of Look Sharp!

Van Morrison (style), for example, would have brought a strong personal connective imprint to bear on a similar batch of material. Might have done a magical bop with a zap of racial criss-cross puzzle. Jackson, unfortunately, is more like John Mayall (attitude) this time ’round. Academic.

Jumpin’ Jive sounds spontaneous —recorded in May, out by early July—and the band has a good time on the jumpier cuts—“Jack You’re Dead,” “Five Guys Named Moe,” the basically instrumental (by Lester Young) “Jumpin’ With Symphony Sid.” Jackson’s regular bassman Graham Maby easily adapts to the environment, the horn charts and drums have punch, and the goofy ensemble back-up vocals capture the old Dorsey spirit.

Still, this record doesn’t make me dig my eggs-on the Jersey side, as the title cut would have it. I wince at the dialects Jackson uses on “San Francisco Fan,” “You Run Your Mouth (And I’ll Run My Businessl” and “What’s The Use Of Getting Sober (When You’re Gonna Get Drunk Again).” His emphasis on trivia like “We The Cats (Shall Hep Ya)”and “You’re My Meat” only, as Jake LaMotta (attitude) says, defeats its own purpose. It makes the form a 40-year-old novelty, not a vital missing link betwixt blues’rt’Berry. No stinging like a bee here.

It’s the right track, Jack.

But turn over the wheel.

Mitchell Cohen

SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES Juju

_(PVC)_

Rock’s role in the contemporary struggle between chaos and control has gone up and down with the civil seesaw. The turn of the screw brings more than just another cry of pain. Currently, those who can afford to—affluent Americans—retreat into the past; a Doors revival may be cool but the Moody Blues and Carpenters too? Those with their backs to the wall—our British counterparts—splinter into factions. Seen from these shores, the constant merry-go-round of fads and fashions may be amusing but it can only turn so fast without falling apart. As I write this, the white riots (and the black and yellow ones) have been taking place nightly for a week-and-a-half; in England, the Long Hot Summer is now.

Siouxsie and the Banshees’ role in all this isn’t easily defined. They came together in punk’s heyday— 1977 —but never indulged in sloganeering or direct finger-pointing. Their tales of breakdowns were more personal than political—the theme of schizophrenia has run through much of their work, from “Suburban Relapse” on ’78’s The Scream through last year’s “Christine”—and like several of their creative contemporaries, they didn’t stay within punk’s musical boundaries for long.

They didn’t stay together as a group for long either, and it’s taken the core members—vocalist/vamp Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin, of the reverberating bass and Lugosian stare—this long to put together a band with the control and creativity they need. Need to do what? To evoke chaos.

And that’s exactly what they’re doing here, often brilliantly. Like the Velvet Underground with Nico and the Doors and Patti Smith at their respective peaks, there is a sense of ritual here. Rhythms invariably revolve around a hypnotically repeated bass pattern surrounded by Budgie’s varied drum attack. ExMagazine guitarist John McGeoch has really come into his own, bringing to his playing the taste of a Robbie Krieger and the tonal subtleties of a Phil Manzanera. Mistress Siouxsie presides over each ceremony superbly, her voice having come a long way from the icy shouts of three years ago.

The themes of the songs themselves have retreated from the streets a step or two. Children’s horror stories abound—the English hit, “Spellbound," the Draculean dirge of “Night Shift,” and the eerie “Halloween”—and this is the light stuff. Abuse of power crops up in “Arabian Nights” and “Monitor” but never so forcefully as in “Sin In My Heart,” a blood boiler wherein Siouxsie acknowledges both excitement and guilt as she demands, “When you grovel at my feet/Keep it short and sweet.” This is followed by the black comedy of “Head Cut” and the tour de force “Voodoo Dolly,” a performance of sustained hysteria* with McGeogh delivering some of the most incredible guitar work I’ve heard in years.

Powerful stuff. Siouxsie’s been juggling power playthings for years—she’s worn both swastikas and the Star of David onstage— and now the music’s caught up. Panic and professionalism are balanced— for now. I guess I’d be scared to watch if Siouxsie’s strings snapped for good and she ended up with a broken victim of her own rag doll dance. But I would, nonetheless.

Michael Davis

ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN Heaven Up Here (Sire/Wamer Bros.)

At first, I had Echo and the Bunnymen pigeon-holed as doomy Doorsy dumbos. But then, slowly, cautiosly, Crocodiles slithered up my leg. It began harmlessly enough with an odd affection for “Villiers Terrace,” and a controlled pleasure called “Do It Clean.” Soon I was eaten alive, an appreciation for the album as a whole. It wasn’t great, there were indeed gaps like the ambitious, faulty “Happy Dead Men,” a not very decent stab at acid affectation. But they’d Survived the sin by Liverpool association.

Now, Heaven Up Here, a steadfast show of strength, a sweet surprise. The boozer’s guide to life during wartime! A compassionate addictive rock album, the old animal untamed and unrepentent! Where Crocodiles was human caricatures, this is humane characteristics; where the former seems played for laughs, the latter is darkly humorous. The manic Ian McCulloch clutching -a bottle of anything in one hand and the complete works of Wilfred Owens (dead on Flanders Field at the age of 25) in the other, stumbles down the stairs, staggers himself straight and sings, “We’re all groovy people/groovy groovy people.” The voice soft and rough, lemon sour, laugh and/or cry. Closer to Morrison Hotel (the best side of the best Doors—for those who know) than The Soft Parade, and it is only a passing comparison, mostly down to McCulloch’s vocal similarities to our Jimbo, a twist of ate that Mac never cashed in on. Besides which, if you had to sound like a pop icon, who’d you choose? Verlaine should be so lucky!

All things being equal, this is a fabulous album. Song after heavenly song, phrases that’ll be in the pop vernacular for quite a while, melodies that’ll haunt you, atmospheres that’ll taunt you. The echoes with Echo still hark, the band still uses those hazy memories to transport, but it’s where they’re taking you that’s changed. These Bunnies don’t rest on time, they manipulate it to their own ends. The revel in what they don’t reveal... and they trick you! Hence the opening “Show Of Strength/“With A Hip.” One song seguing into the other, retaining the basic rhythm, a variation on the same melody, and a lyrical continuation in some ways, showing the two sides of pride.' It keeps plebes like me from complaining, that’s for sure.

I could choose any (or all) musicians here to gush about, but a special treat is Will Sergeant’s lead guitar. His keenly (cleanly) descriptive playing affects less via the psychedelic specialty acts we’ve come to expect than through the sheer temerity he shows. The surreptitiously evocative middle eight of “It Was Pleasure,” the calm before the storm opening of “The Disease,” the awaited rock aesthetic climax to “With A Hip.”

McCulloch’s once right over the top rhythm guitar is being kept in check for the good of all, none of the grandstand diving that ruined some of Crocodiles. Lee Pattinson’s bass works not just as pure cohesion but also as a force field for taling off, and it’s the same with de Frietas’ sticks—he does a shuffle on “Turquoise Days” that leaves the rest of the band open to the song’s possibilities. McCulloch’s singing is simply sublime, but his phrasing is what makes the songs have the extra edge, adding strange accents on normal words (“I swaarer!”).

If the album has any overall themes it’s self-respect. You don’t have to be rich pr dress up in silly clothes to have it. Do what you do as well as you can, and live within your own moral definitions. That’s the message I get from these nervous natural songs. And I get them without being talked down to, through the subjective, open-ended open-to-interpretation lyrics, from the open emotive and beautiful music. Echo and the Bunnymen are breaking right through to the other side and taking us with them. The legend starts tonight, at the corner bar. “It must be hell down there/ because it’s heaven up here.” Going up up up!

Iman Lababedi