RECORDS

RECORDS

DEPARTMENTS

AMERICAN NORM

BOB SEGER & THE SILVER BULLET BAND Like A Rock (Capitol)

by Michael Davis

Yes, but is it a rock?

When rock artists go more than three years between albums, I tend to write ’em off as Missing: Inaction, but there are always exceptions. Some musicians need to lead semi-normal lives for awhile in order to write their strongest material. Those who don’t do much besides cranking out albums, videos and concerts often end up writing about the process, which usually leads to OK party music without much depth or insight. But the best rock ’n’ roll songwriting, from Chuck Berry on, gives us a look at the real world from a viewpoint that allows us to coexist with it, whether from behind a smile, a sneer, a sigh or a scream. To make that viewpoint believable, the writer can’t be too far removed from his listener’s lifestyles.

Which is to say, I don’t necessarily hate Bob Seger for taking nearly four years to come up with this album, especially since he tends to write mainstream songs about normal people. With Springsteen and Mellencamp being all over the place lately, we’ve hardly been hurting for high-class heartland rock ’n’ roll. Their visibility and Seger’s long absence has helped make “American Storm”/ “Fortunate Son” an outta-thebox hit. (Note to configuration fans: Seger’s timely cover of Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son” is available on the 45 and CD.)

Now, ‘‘American Storm” strikes me as an OK song, but falls short of major statement status. A distant musical cousin of “Hollywood Nights, it includes some telling lines about _ the social effects of drugs, but by 1 the time the choruses roll I around, Bob’s retreated to vague I imagery.

To me, the best bets for the | biggest hits finish off Like A 1 Rock. Seger better release 1 “Somewhere Tonight” as a 1 single soon, before some popI country wimp pours Nashville 8 syrup all over it and make a mint. I The preceding “It’s You” also 8 sounds right for the radio. CatI chy statements of loyalty are I often big in troubled times; 1 besides, Tom Petty fans should I appreciate the line about, | “...finding me a wall to punch 1 right through.”

The contentment in “It’s You” I resonates more deeply in the 1 context of this album than it I would over the airwaves' though, I because it follows “The Ring,” I which closes off side one. “The Ring” is one of three nostalgia songs here—too many people looking back, if you ask me—and it’s the one that includes enough details so that the characters emerge as real individuals who’ve made decisions that they live with, with very different degrees of regret.

The others, “Sometimes” and “Like A Rock,” aren’t really bad, but I’m getting tired of songs about failed expectations when the characters rarely consider such questions as why did I have those dreams? Who gained from me having them? And what can I replace them with that I can live with? If you don’t ask yourself hard questions when looking back at your failures, all you’ll usually find is self-pity.

Fortunately, these three numbers are balanced out by three about people who are trying to change their lives. The woman on the “Tightrope” may be a bit shaky, but the vocal and synth progression are suitably tough. The survivor in The Aftermath” is given an appreciating look from Seger and an effective melody.

But the most determined people on the album aren’t even Americans; they’re the Cuban boat people whose bravery is celebrated in “Miami.” The tune also sets Seger up for a possible Miami Vice episode. Let’s see, Bob could be a baseball coach, instilling American values in a team of Cuban kids while trying to keep them away from the shady pusher who deals smack out of the back of a Honda dealership. But I digress.

Anyway, like life approaching middle age, this album offers some growth and some stagnation. Not bad for a greybeard. Welcome to the mid-’80s, Bob; hope we hear from you again before the decade’s out.

After weeks of testing, the results are in: it’s a rock.

LOU REED

Mistrial (RCA)

Lou Reed sure has aged gracefully. Once upon a time, nobody could have predicted that the guy who unleashed “Heroin” and “Sister Ray” (nearly 20 years ago) had any chance of making it to Social Security. Yet here he is, against all odds, both feet on the ground, and still got his brains. Sakes alive!

Growing up in public has taken sweet Lou to some pretty strange extremes, from death-defying speed trips of the Velvet Underground days to the heavy metal burlesque of Rock ’N’ Roll Animal to Metal Machine Music, four sides of white-noise feedback. Over the past decade, while punks, Jonathan Richman, the Violent Femmes, and a zillion others mined his stuff for ideas, Reed himself settled down, cranking out more or less straightforward albums of rock ’n’ roll songs. Meanwhile, his old weirdo image has continued to roam free.

That’s one of the things the excellent Mistrial wants to address. Set to a stomping, material beat, the title track reviews Reed’s history for the purpose of clearing his name. Yes, Lou snarls, he was “speeding in the street” at an early age. And yes, his “attitude was bad.” So? “Don’t you point your finger at me,” snaps Reed. Leaving aside the fact that what he really wants is a fair trial, not a mistrial, Lou’s motion to be judged for his current self and not his reputation deserves to be granted.

While Reed doesn’t chronicle his own life on the brink anymore, the world outside offers plenty of lurid source material. In the thundering “Video Violence,” he zeros in on deviant conduct with chilling accuracy. While his guitar spews out distempered tones, Lou wearily recounts the effect of slasher movies, topless bars, and the like on willing, stupid audiences. For instance, the song’s working stiff beats up a whore, then goes home to watch a rightwing evangelist on TV. The conslusion? Simply this: “The currents rage so deep inside us/This is the age of video violence.” Yuck.

Equally topical, “The Original Wrapper” struts his funky self, and Reed glibly raps about AIDS, the Middle East, and tainted consumer goods to a jittery urban beat. The old codger oughta try a joint venture with those whippersnappers in Run-D.M.C. By the way, if these sociological essays sound overly serious, they’re too rowdy and danceworthy to be mistaken for sermons.

The rest of Mistrial is less harrowing, though right on target. Spunky, compact rockers like “Mama’s Got A Lover” and “No Money Down” are the product of a young heart. (Be sure and catch the hilariously disgusting video Godley and Creme made for “No Money Down,” too.) Reed reveals his adult side on “Don’t Hurt A Woman,” the spiritual twin of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” and “Tell It To Your Heart,” a sequel to Transformer’s “Satellite Of Love.” This time, Lou sees spinning lights in the night, then discovers that they’re props for a TV commercial, which doesn’t lessen the love he feels for his honey one bit. Not very logical, but it’s awful sweet.

So do yourself a favor and get hip to the well-rounded 1986 model Lou Reed. No longer evil or dangerous (hardly ever, anyway), he’s become a wise old big brother that normal folks like you and me can relate to. Mistrial makes being grown-up seem like an OK deal after all.

Jon Young

JULIAN LENNON

The Secret Value Of Daydreaming (Atlantic)

Hey Jude, take a sad song and make it lousy. Too blunt? Wait a minute...I’ve got it. Nowhere man, the world ain’t at your command. Too oblique? All right, hold on...hey, I know. How about the truth? Julie, if your dad hadn’t been in the greatest rock ’n’ roll band of all time, you wouldn’t have a recording contract and I wouldn’t be sitting here trying to think of a decent way to tell you your new album is a piece of junk.

Granted, this kid’s been over some tough emotional terrain. Plus he’s got his father’s rep dogging his tracks which is unfortunate and unfair and he can’t help the heredity that touches his vocal cords. Why then did I have the nasty suspicion that Valotte went out of its way to milk every last vestige of Imagine-era John that it could? And if Julian is so enamored of his father’s music why couldn’t it be “Please Please Me” rather than “Mind Games”? (Beats me.)

The chip-off-the-old-block fallacy is much more downplayed on The Secret Value Of Daydreaming. Julian has found his own “voice,” has his own “vision,” sought his own “style,” and what rubbish he comes up with! He immerses himself in Phil Ramone’s antiseptic production, reaches into his little bag of cliches, and subjects us to the usual sensitive artiste bullshit.

I sure as hell don’t intend to bore you by quoting the lyrics; suffice to say they’re as wishywashy and as mundane as the music. Something like “Stick Around” can serve perfectly as the epitome of CHC (Contemporary Hit Crapola): a cluttered arrangement, half-assed involvement and the overwhelming feeling that it’s much ado about nada. Most of Julian’s songs are on the verge of going up in puffs of smoke; his genteel walkingon-eggshells delivery doesn’t help matters any.

He’s not much of a rocker either. He does all right on “This Is My Day,” actually getting himself a bit worked up and being downright assertive on a surprisingly lively chorus. But his idea of raising the roof is having Billy Joel throw in some by-thenumbers boogie woogie piano on “You Get What You Want.”

Really, this boy’s more comfortable when things are a bit more, shall we say, subdued. On the typically sluggish “Everyday” I could swear he’s mumbling something like “bang a gong,” but that can’t be right— no get-it-on womp-bomp for this shy, retiring lad! He’s much more at home with the idea of riding his seesaw—witness the wretched Moody Blue excess of “Coward To The End?” which gives new meaning to the word “plod.”

Can’t wait for Sean’s album.

Craig Zeller

HUSKER DU

Candy Apple Grey (Warner Bros.)

Alas, another cult band, after years of honest toil on a small but brave label, has debuted on one of those big, unsavory, decadent major labels. What can it all mean? Well, for one thing, having actually spotted this record hovering tentatively in the lower rungs of at least one chart, it means that more people are going to get to hear this hardcoreand-much-more trio from Minneapolis (not that there haven’t been a lot of chances—the guys have been so prolific lately that I don’t even wanna talk about it, except to say that this is their third release in just over a year, and seekers should be advised that Zen Arcade is their most fullof-surprises album, and New Day Rising their toughest). And they’ve made the label jump with only the smallest of changes, changes so non-ostentatious as to seem evolutionary, you know, like they were going to sound like this even if they stayed on that noble little label (which, by the way, was SST).

In fact, much here assures that, unlike the Replacements, who at least cleaned their faces if not their fingernails for their above-ground debut, the Dus have shown up on Warner Bros, with the same take-it-or-leave-it attitude their fans have come to know and need. And it’s even more heartening that the band has the temerity to lead off the album with the most “difficult” offering here, an unpolished hardcore shriek of frustration called “Crystal” which is built around a nervy (and nervous) metaphor for modern civilization (“crystal glass lined up in a row/watched over by the Gl Joes”). The singer here is guitarist Bob Mould (who does the lead vocals on the songs he pens, while drummer Grant Hart does likewise on his compositions). Mould has an appealingly rough and entirely believable voice, often bracingly abrasive, at other times just a weary rasp. When not writing rather defensive love songs (a tendency he shares with Hart) or pre-political rants, he delves into some basic what-could-it-all-mean philosophizing—a common enough urge but, since his most reliable tools are plain language and sincerity, he spends a lot of time getting nowhere and admitting to confusion. A high point of the album is when he turns yet another unrewarding quest for meaning into a love song simply by ending one of his frustrated attempts to make sense of things (and don’t get me wrong, you gotta admire the guy for even trying) with the tagline “All This I Have Done For You.” Pretty neat. Not so neat is Mould’s tendency to self-pity, something he usually either overrides with anger or tempers with resignation, but which at least once on the album overwhelms and mars the song (“Hardly Getting Over It”).

Drummer Hart possesses a somewhat more mellifluous vocal style than Mould and his songs are generally less ambitious. So it’s no surprise he’s responsible for what I think is the album’s best shot at a hit single “Sorry Somehow”; great hook, and more hardrock than hardcore.

But though one can pick at these songs for being a little too this or not enough that, overall the energy level is consistently high (remember when that was a big compliment?), the lyrics are agreeably chewy, and if you haven’t heard this group yet, you’re in for a treat. If you’re familiar with them, this will probably seem just OK. But it’s a tribute to the band that if this is only a moderately good Husker Du album, it’s because they have a lot to live up to.

Richard C. Walls

LET’S ACTIVE

Big Plans For Everybody (IRS.)

When Mitch Easter, Chris Stamey, Don Dixon and their fellow travelers in the North Carolina Sneakers-cum-dB’s axis drifted north 10 years ago, one characteristic they shared was a skeptical but enthusiastic musical sensibility, a reality sandwich of ringing Rickenbackers and pretty melodies that understood pop’s serious side without neglecting its youth or beauty. Other skinny-tie bands may have sung gaily of love and lust; these guys, to some extent following the path of their spiritual mentor, Alex Chilton, proffered occasionally disconsolate musing on how shitty things can be.

While earning a well-deserved reputation as a talented producer, and building his Drive-In Studio into something of a Gold Star shrine for the now-pop generation, Mitch Easter also continues to lead Let’s Active. Two-thirds of the band departed after 1984’s Cypress', Easter recorded Big Plans For Everybody (title courtesy Cory Aquino) almost solo, with four friends (including ex-Active bassist Faye Hunter and two new sidepersons) helping out here and there. With this record, Easter leaves behind Let’s Active’s mantle of superficial cuteness, cutting through the twinky affability to sow a wide melancholy streak. The cover shows him sitting on a desolate stretch'of road in the middle of a body of water, wearing a coat and a far-off expression that suggests forlorn isolation.

Musically more agile and confident than ever, Easter is able to contrast a veneer of familiar pop noises (echo, harmonies, rich guitar overdubs, bouncy beats) with a dark, almost subliminal undercurrent. The unsettling memory of cold dark afternoons spent alone that infests songs like “In Little Ways,” “Talking To Myself,” “Won’t Go Wrong” and “Badger” is the subtle result of minor chords, downspirited melodic twists, carefully woven arrangements and deft sonic shadings. Lyrics only occasionally match the bleak ambience; “Happy is hard work,” observes Mitch in “Still Dark Out,” making it clear he hasn’t always been equal to the challenge.

Far from being a downer, Big Plans also offers “Writing The Book Of Last Pages,” a nearperfect John Lennon parody with backwards guitar, sitar and Beatlesque piano; “Route 67,” an energetic slide guitar workout without words; “Reflecting Pool,” a plain, simple and pretty ballad. “Last Chance Town” lays the “Cold Turkey” riff onto Marc Bolan electric boogaloo lyrics.

Big Plans offers an antidote to the saccharine aftertaste many find objectionable in modern power-pop; on the contrary, what remains is the bittersweet memory of a finished romance. Like sitting alone through a really sad movie, or playing too many Smiths singles in a row, it inspires a prevalent sadness that’s quite rewarding in its way. Get unhappy!!

Ira Robbins

THERMOS HUNT CONTINUES!

VAN HALEN 5150 (Warner Bros.)

by Richard Riegel

As his esteemed predecessor in Van Halen might put it, Big Bad Sammy is Sweet Samuel now. Yep, it’s true, never mind that nobody this side of Cub Koda could step right into David Lee Roth’s big-mouthed tap shoes anyhow. Still, Sammy Hagar’s first recorded outing as the lead vocalist of Van Halen is a lot tamer than it really should be.

And I feel guilty about that, too, as I’m one of those EasterVi Liberal rockcrits who was taking Mr. Hagar to task for the jingo dynamics of his solo albums just a year or so ago. Judging by his performances on this VH disc, I think Sammy threw out too much of his essential bluster along with the right-wing sloganeering us pinkos were fussing about.

Too many of the cuts on 5150 feature Hagar vocals and lyrics (?) that are strident and oh-soserious, that sound as though they should have been released on Scotti Bros, (home of Robert Tepper and his Rocky ilk) rather than Warner Bros. These include the lead single, “Why Can’t This Be Love,” a slice of “Jump”-like tweezer synth-metal, as well as the song I’m actually hearing on the radio now, “Best Of Both Worlds.” The latter features patented Hagar block phrasing plus a fatal absence of even the smallest shred of irony. By the second cut of one of “his” VH albums, David Lee Roth had always put us on 20 dozen ways already, but Hagar really seems to mean (or at least think he should mean) every dry syllable of these dry songs. I’d almost rather see him go back to crucifying American workers on the hood of his Eye-talian car.

BUT: 5150 does have a couple-three real hot cuts on it, I’m just not sure whether the record company or even the band have recognized them as such yet. One is “Get Up,” which is constructed on a fast blues shuffle somewhat like “Hot For Teacher,” but which also catches Sammy really feeling his solo oats—he’s not worried for a second about being compared to Roth one way or the other. A second scorcher on 5150 is “Summer Nights,” a hissin’, hot metallic twine anthem, and then there’s the title cut, which comes complete with a sinuous and skrotchy guitar raveup courtesy of Mr. Eddie Van Halen. Like Hagar, Eddie seems to be haunted by the cash-fisted ghost of “Jump,” as he keeps his second-language synthesizer on the premises.

Among other 5150 cuts which might do well (with an appropriate video treatment, of course) is “Good Enough, which includes both an unfortunate woman-as-meat metaphor and a hilarious Hagar-thehorrible talking break that parodies Roth’s most slobbery soliloquies. My favorite cut on the album just might be the last one, “Inside,” where a deadpan Hagar finally addresses the essential problem of “replacing” David Lee Roth: “It’s not what you are, you see/lt’s how you dress/That’s one thing I’ve learned from these guys.”

Total cool-o to the max, Sammy, you can’t expect to match Roth’s beloved obnoxiousness and flamboyance overnight, not without digging deeper into his wardrobe trunk of cartoon imagery. I got faith that you can do that, Sammy boy—you’re not the Paul Revere of ’80s rock for nothing!

(P.S. to the consumers: Aren’t you glad I got through this whole review without once mentioning that this is Van Halen’s second straight album with a four-digit numerical title?!?)

THE CRAMPS

A Date With Elvis (New Rose Records)

The Cramps and their demonically hilarious .brand of indocile rock ’n’ sonics, have always been an infectious, skull-munching, rockaholic bunch. From their early days on, they’ve put tongue in orifice and have never gotten off of that proverbial hayride to Purgatory.

Whether you tag them sleezeabilly, shockabilly or even slimeabilly, as I’m sure a lot of those grease-pomaded ’billy purists out there in the manic wastelands of nostalgia-turned-schizophrenia-and-homicidal would call ’em, the Cramps consistently manage to confuse you every step of the way with their understandings and permutations of rock contradiction in all of its inherent glory.

A Date With Elvis (which is so new that it’s dedicated to the memory of Ricky Nelson, and I’m not even all that sure that this was done before or after his maxi atmosphere blow-out) starts out with an evil tremolo ode called “How Far Can Too Far Go?”—a minor sampler of summarized Cramp-philosophy that snarls and nips at your tenderloin mind with its unnerving question—and ends with “Aloha From Hell,” a tit-upping journey into what REALLY happens when Tipper Gore has had one too many Vodka Martinis with her designer valiums and joyrides the congressional trolley that links the various houses of gov’t, wailing out Lesley Gore’s Greatest Hits at the top of her besotted, bespattering lungs. Phew!!!

Sandwiched in between these two songs, like some psychosexual-tuna-inspired revision of Susan Brownmillers’ feminist tome, Against Our Will, are a series of Crampabilly “Bouncing Betty” mines (those are the ones that were designed specifically to disembowel rather than kill) that’d be far too intelligent for the Kleenex and zipper set of the Pussycat Theaters, but way too metaphorically raunchy for the 1 Playboy Channel (even though a j Lux Interior, Ivy Rorschach sitcom about transsexual mailmen running a restaurant in Queens on HBO wouldn’t be entirely out of the question...).

Beginning with “The Hot Pearl Snatch”—a kind of internal/ I gangster gynecological/heist j epic—rambling through the nihil1 istic folk balladry of “People Ain’t J No Good,” the skin-magazine inI spired, “What’s Inside A Girl?” I and the frantically anthemic and | beautiful “Can Your Pussy Do j The Dog?,” A Date With Elvis is j fully realized and probably has Natalie Wood spinning in her... j

Side Two of this Cramp1 agraphic excursion into the | duller edges of the pornographic imagination begins with a Tolk1 ien-via-Henry Miller glimpse into I a mythical land called, “Kis1 miaz,” (get it?), a place that not I only rivals but reviles such j places as Atlantis, GondwanaI land, Hyperborea and Buffalo, 1 N.Y.. Next we’ve got “Cornfed \ Dames,” a Crampsemantic ver1 sion of Jessica Lange’s Country * movie, adorned as usual with a guitar/tremolo (Ivy really is the I Supreme Dream of the Wavering I Electric Inevitable) solo that’s I gotta go down in the annals of pure stun-grunge/garage senti1 mentality. And this seafood platI ter of sonic-sensuality rounds out I with “(Hot Pool Of) WomanI need,” a song that left me utterly I speechless and describes in a I much better fashion the LP’s I cover (Ivy in a Lizard-skin bathI ing suit that’d give Morrison a I hard-on even in rock ’n’ roll I heaven) which in and of itself is I worth at least a thousand or so I words.

By way of closing down this grist-mill of words, let me just say that A Date With Elvis reaffirms I what a good friend of mine once I said: “Some days rock ’n’ roll I makes you feel old, real old.

Other days it makes you feel I younger than yesterday.” This is I definitely one of those younger I than yesterday LPs. A Date With I Elvis is already the best record of 1986, and I don’t think ANYONE’S gonna beat it out. Hotcha! A click of the heels, and a forced dream march into the valley of Ivy Rorschachs’ thighs...

Joe (the Amphetamine Porky of Desire) Fernbacher

DWIGHT YOAKAM

Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. (Reprise)

The Purist let loose a thin stream of tobacco juice between his teeth and into the brass spittoon. “Not another ‘Next Gram Parsons,”’ he harumphed, as purists are wont to do. “Just another El Lay cocaine cowboy. A rhinestone pretty boy. A studied formalist. A country-shlocker riding the new wave coattails of his club circuit buddies, Los Lobos, X and the Blasters. If he came from Nashville, you wouldn’t even be asking me about him...”

Precisely the point. The New Country’s newest phenom, Dwight Yoakam, was “too country” for the home of C&W, too orthodox and roots-conscious for the sugar-coated MOR pap churned out by Nashville. So he turned West, to the land of Buck Owens and the Bakersfield Sound, where he sharpened his brand of honky-tonk swing to a rock-hard edge by putting together a band that included guitarist (and long-time Yoakam collaborator) Pete Anderson and fiddler Brantley Kearns. The result was an acclaimed six-song indie label EP which became the basis for his major league debut, an impressively accomplished, full-blown bow.

“Jes’ a second,” cautioned the Ghost of Country Past & Present, a darkened spittle forming at the side of his mouth. “Why is it the best songs are the covers? And the lyrics...has he written a line as good as ‘Love is a burning thing/And it makes a fiery ring’ (“Ring Of Fire”) or ‘Everyday you love me less/Each day I love you more’ (“Heartaches By The Number”)? I mean, what’s this stuff ’bout ‘guitars, Cadillacs and hillbilly music?’ It reminds me of Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid. Next thing you’re gonna tell me is he’s the grandson of a Kentucky coalminer...”

You guessed it, Grand Oie Opry breath, the kid’s for real, the music’s in his blood. His cracked Hank Williams yodel vocals tingle with the thrill of rediscovery, not the awkwardness of slavish devotion. The man pays homage to his roots without becoming mired in them. And, while Dwight’s original material may not be overly distinctive, the band arrangements are cracklingly crisp, augmented by a hoedownin’ fiddle (surging through “South of Cincinnati” and the Maria McKee guest spot, “Bury Me” to maximum emotional effect) or a sawing steel (tugging along “Heartaches By The Number”). Let’s put it this way, he’s at least up there with George Strait in country’s hopedfor revitalization.

“I’ll take Ricky Skaggs,” says the Knight of the Nouveau Nashville, “as long as he doesn’t put Ed Koch in any more of his videos.”

Which raises the Big Question. Can/will country’s old guard accept this brash, but reverent new kid on the block, or will he be ostracized like so many before him? On the other hand, can he attract a new wave crowd to the eternal verities and joys of good ole country music? To be honest, I’d much rather hear the conservative, but finely-tuned, classicism of Yoakam than the trumped-up AOR country-rock bombastiCs of Lone Justice.

The Keeper of the Twang is still unconvinced. “Yoakam,” he snorts, spitting the name out along with a torrent of tobacco juice. “Wasn’t that the name of Li’l Abner’s family?”

He may just be a Beverly Hillbilly, but Dwight Yoakam’s my kind of cowboy.

Roy Trakin

BOW WOW WOW

LAURIE ANDERSON Home Of The Brave (Warner Bros.)

by Cynthia Rose

It’s a bogus theatricality in American life which gives us a pop star like Laurie Anderson. And Home Of The Brave—latest in a line of soundtrack packages scissored together with the aid of guitar, flute, saxophone, keyboards, foreign languages, Vocoders, harmonizers, Synclav-> iers, Linndrums, knives, forks, and bells—does nothing to enlarge the shrinking smirk of her turf.

The credits may read like a muso’s celebrity call (Adrian Belew, David Van Tiegham, Dolette MacDonald and the dreaded William S. Burroughs), but its eight tracks play like a vocational art exercise set to cutrate John Cage.

Since 1980 and “O Superman,” Laurie Anderson has extorted maximum mileage from her “performance artist” label. And, in the flesh, with her gags, slides, and flourescent footwear, she puts on a solid and entertaining multi-media show. But a performance artist she is not. Performance art embraces flux; it is about the variables involved in experience. (Just check the cuttings of performance artists like Hannah Wilke, Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, each the “inspiration” behind some specific homage from Ms. Anderson). Anderson’s ouevre, petrified in-, to albums, repetitive anecdotes, and now film, is all means to an end: celebrity.

Hence this new mess of patchy tunes, breathy intonations, “evocative” snatches of recognizable music (i.e., simple melodies fluffed out with multipart backing harmonies or bouncy basslines) and organized noise. Like all Anderson’s work, it parades high-art pretensions— only to deliver the goods tailored to cozily accessible dimensions. The worst feature of the whole package is its organizing principle: ironic humor.

This kind of ironic is how you sound when you’ve lowered every expectation. And that’s what makes Home Of The Brave (an intentionally ironic title of course) such depressing, redundant stuff. ‘‘Ah desire!” breathes the album’s opener, ‘‘Smoke Rings.” ‘‘First it’s red. Then it’s blue. And every time I see an iceberg, it reminds me of you.” Robert Johnson this is not. And no kind of “conceptual” approach will work to dress up this LP’s lyrical content.

Which is ironic, since “art” is obviously Anderson’s god. Like every good culture vulture, she points up each borrowed reference, each pilfered lick and quote. But there are fewer here than even on ’84’s Mister Heartbreak] like all assimilators who refuse to run any risks, Anderson faces a shortage of raw material. The result: repeated tricks or extensions of already-exposed ideas (here, “Language Is A Virus” and another Sharkey song, “Sharkey’s Night.”)

Every parody steals its energy from another source, and Anderson’s persona is too caught up in detachment to beef things up with instincts of her own. So Home Of The Brave ends up a bad, bitter-sounding joke. Which explains the nasty edge to Laurie’s lament—Side one, track four—about the people who now look at her in the street and say, “Oh no! Not another Laurie Anderson clone!” Given the quality of this album, she won’t have to suffer much longer.