CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

ROBERT CHRfStGAll

BLACK UHURU “Brutal”

(RAS)

Junior Reid ululates where Michael Rose sang, but the big loss is more crucial: politics, some rudimentary specificity. Up against the run of ridmic rhetoricians, though they do just fine. Both Reid and Duckie Simpson have a knack for rhetoric, and while Sly & Robbie might have pushed Simpson’s “Reggae With Me” out on the dancefloor where it belongs, this is their most pyrotechnic production yet—they’ve brought Babylon back home. B +

CHARLIE BURTON &

THE HICCUPS “I Heard That"

(Wild)

The Hiccups make with good old guitar, bass, and drums while Charlie fakes some rockabilly up front, and when it works it’s quite catchy in an utterly received sort of way. The conservatism isn’t annoying or boring because, although Charlie loves this music—cf. “One Man’s Trash”—he doesn’t give a damn for roots or form. He just wants to write some songs. I’m not sorry he doesn’t share my liberal respect for Vietnam and world hunger, and when he diddleybops through his parents’ coronaries I know why. Inspirational Verse: “Water’s? thick, but blbod is thicker/Daddy (mommy) had a bum, bum ticker.” B +

BUTTHOLE SURFERS “Rembrandt Pussyhorse”

(Touch & Go)

I respect these guys, really—their dedication to dementia is a rare and wondrous thing. But their claque’s idea of accessibility is Iron Butterfly on bad acid digging deconstruction, yet another version of the touching avant-garde truism which holds that the proper study of incoherence is incoherent. Upped a notch or two for concept, attitude, hype, bullshit, somewhere in there. B-

EL DEBARGE (Gordy)

Especially since Eldra, to honor the name his mama gave him, has shown something like genius as both writer and producer, the plethora of outside help is a double down at first. But though you can be sure this projected breakthrough is expected to produce a run of peppy crossover singles, starling with El’s second straight meaningless movie theme, it has the flow of an album, and even the personal stamp. This is provided not so much by what they’re selling, the boyish clarity of El’s voice—he does his greatest singing on oddly shaped, pepless ballads with his siblings lending their support—as by the outside help, most of it sufficiently skillful and second-rate to mimic his rhythmic and melodic quirks. The lyrics get away with adding hints of maturity to his customary show of naivete. And the arrangements are still a down, their hooky beats fattened with the plush keybs of big-league pop. Here’s hoping he’s saving his own stuff for his nuclear family. B +

ROKY ERICKSON “Don’t Slander me”

(Pink Dust)

The now rerecorded title single was a stroke, all natural timing and spirit possession, a paradise regained of rock ’n’ roll cliche. The album exploits this miracle—sounds like a bunch of wouldbe old farts (with genuine article Jack Casasy lending a touch of authenticity) latching onto the old wildman for the kind of magic carpet ride other music lovers only collect. It’s too precise, too forceful, too showy. And it rocks out anyway. If you can bear the protracted tributes to Erickson’s private gods, this’ll give you a charge. Try “You Drive Me Crazy.” Or “Crazy Mama.” Or “Bermuda,” about the triangle. B +

THE FEELIES “The Good Earth"

(Coyote)

Coproducer Peter Buck is occasioning harrumpsh about how suddenly they sound like R.E.M., but if anything R.E.M. sounds like them with excess baggage: aching lyricism, gorgeous hooks, mumbled poetry—in a word, corn. They also sound a lot like a classic band called Velvet Underground. And like themselves, unmistakably, even though six years and Peter Buck have rounded off their gawky corners and fill■LJ ed out their sound. A-

H PETER GABRIEL ■J “So”

(Geffen)

Gabriel’s so smart he knows rhythm is ^ what makes music go, which relieves him of humdrum melodic responsibilities but doesn’t get him up on the one—smart guys do go for texture in a pinch. Like his smart predecessor James Taylor, who use to climax concerts with the clever macho parody “Steamroller,” this supporter of good causes reaches the masses with “Sledgehammer,” which is no parody. Where is “Biko” now that we need it again? B-

MARVIN GAYE

“Motown Remembers Marvin Gaye" (Tamla)

These “never before released masters” were rejected for good reason—they lacked both the hooky spark that spelled hit to Mr. Gordy and the show-tune gentility he thought appropriate to the upscale LP market. The result is a groove album Motown wouldn’t have risked back in 1965, by which time seven of these 12 tracks had been laid down, though not so sparklingly engineered. As much a showcase for the then unheralded Funk Brothers band as for the jazz-tinged pop-gospel phrasing of the label’s pet matinee idol, it’s a chance to hear Motown’s music unalloyed, without the distration of sweet memory. And damned if I can tell what flaw Gordy descried in Smokey’s “Just Like A Man,” Ashford & Simpson’s “Dark Side Of The World,” or Cosby & Stevenson’s “That’s The Way It Goes.” A-

MARVIN GAYE “Romantically Yours”

(Columbia)

The sad testament of a tortured weirdo who longed to redeem himself in the world of middle-class convention. On side one he covers “standards” that are beneath him (“More”), beyond him (“Fly Me To The Moon”), or beside the point (“Maria”). On side two he attempts to write his own. The singing isn’t bad—was it ever? The strings are godawful. C +

GENESIS “Invisible Touch”

(Atlantic)

For a while I was tempted to buzz Phil Collins over his former fearless leader. He’s a warmer singer, God help them both, and the formerly useless Tony Banks proves adept with the keyb hooks. But in the end I couldn’t tolerate the generalization density—not just of the lyrics, where Gabriel’s personal and geopolitical details offer some evidence that he’s been there, but of the hooks, which end up feeling coercive, an effect unmitigated by Collins’s whomping instrumental technique. And just to prove they’re still Genesis, we got solos.C +

RICK JAMES “The Flag”

(Gordy)

I generally ignore charges that political content is commercially motivated, but with James I buy ’em. The Real Rick was the moist romantic fop of The Glow, and when his selfexpression didn’t get over he churned out some lines on the Bomb, honing his craft by the by. C +

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MOFUNGO

"Messenger Dogs Of The Gods" (Lost)

Things fall apart—that we know. The question is what to do about it. Pop craftsmen combat this truth, or lie about it, by fashioning anti-entropic modules within which a healthy dose of abandon can do its work, while keepers of the avant-garde tradition walk into a collapsing building and plug in their amps. An infinity of further choices awaits both camps, and most of them are wrong. Mofungo’s are right: pride rather than self-congratulation, anger rather than loathing, struggle rather than despair. Both funny and witty, unassumingly compassionate, glancing fondly off the folk musics they look to and the rock they play, they sound less weird and inchoate the more you listen. Some avant-gardists would tell you that’s their problem. What do you think? A?

JEFFREY OSBOURNE “Emotional”

(A&M)

I’m trying to figure out what it means to say I kind of like this record, a big-budget multiproducer job of the sort suddenly standard in crossoverland. It’s not just that I’m impressed with all the heavy equipment, from Osborne’s dolomite voice to the usual phalanx of hitmen turning out material. I respond—that’s one thing kind of liking it means. And though the response feels synthetic, it’s not unreal. Which is just what I’d say of the emotions on display, from bemine to Soweto-must-be-free. B

JOHN PRINE “German Afternoons”

(Oh Boy)

Just in case you were wondering, this relaxed, confident album is where Prine comes out and admits he’s a folkie, opening with an A. P. Carter tune he’s been performing for a quarter century and commandeering sidemen from New Grass Revival and suchlike. The songs are straightforward and homemade, their great theme the varied love life of a man whose wife Rachael plays bass and sings harmony here and there, though not on the extended beer commercial “Out Of Love,” nor on “Bad Boy,” about “how to be guilty without being Catholic.” B+

DAVID LEE ROTH “Eat ’Em And Smile”

(Warner Bros,)

With everybody from Patti to Belinda to Peter to Eldra kissing pop’s ass, Roth gives it a pinch and keeps on trucking. Maybe because he’s lived out his wimpier fantasies on last year’s EP, here he’s free to mastermind his own piece of multiplatinum potential. Sure he covers “That’s Life,” but he also assembles a metal band that’ll cut old buddies: Maynard Ferguson drummer, cult heaven bassist, and on guitar former Zappa and Lydon sideman Steve Vai, who splits the difference between parody and virtuosity. I mean, Vai is funny without opening his mouth. And of course, so is our voluble auteur, who makes Miss Liberty a burlesque queen and neither lady a whore. B+

SKATALITES “Stretching Out”

(ROIR cassette)

Recorded live in 1983 on a two-track TEAC and God knows what else by a reconstituted bunch of originators, some of whom hadn’t seen one another in a decade and wished it was longer, this 48-minutes-a-side retrospective sounds better than the ’60s studio rarities Top Deck compiled a few years ago and is a lot of fun to boot. We’re talking party soundtrack for lazybones, the universal polka hop-and-shuffle of a thousand folk dances. Bump bottoms to “Confucius,” “Fidel Castro,” “Lee Harvey Oswald.” B+

U.T.F.O.

“Skeezer Pleezer”

(Select)

Some of their sketches and tall tales— especially the cheerfully amoral anticrime versifying of “Just Watch—sound observed. But too often the gimmicks are received and the generalizations fabricated. And they can not “sing a little bit.” B

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND “Another View”

(Verve)

One objective part of me knows that these barrel scrapings are for fanatics and archivists. But another objective part of me knows that the barrel scrapings of a seminal, protean, conceptually accomplished band are their own reward. From the raw power of the instrumental “Guess I’m Falling In Love” to the dry lyricism of the instrumental “I’m Gonna Move Right In,” from the tight studio “We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together” to the intense early “Rock And Roll,” you don’t have to know jackshit abut the band to enjoy the music—on the contrary, you have to put aside your preconceptions. Because nobody experimented more successfully than these folks. A-

WHODINI “Back In Black”

(Jive)

They’re not just ladies’ men, they’re the big brothers every B-boy wishes he had. Or so they hope. Autobiographical examples make their stay-in-school and one-love advice more convincing than most, but just to cover all the bases they don’t stint with the etiquette tips (“That’s Dorn Perignon, it’s supposed to bubble”). And nowhere are they catchier than on the “tag team sex” of “I’m A Ho” or more realistic than on “The Good Part”: “But I keep going for it and I won’t stop/Because I don’t believe there is a good part/Because if there is a good part it ain’t in my neighborhood.” B+

STEVE WINWOOD “Back In The High Life”

(Island)

This is the fate of a wunderkind with more talent than brains: after two decades of special treatment, he derives all the selfesteem he needs just from surviving, as they say. He’s confident that the veracity and unpretentiousness of his well-wrought banalities makes them interesting. In fact, they’re exactly as interesting as he is. C

ADDITIONAL CONSUMER NEWS Addresses: Coyote, Box 112, Old Hoboken, NJ 07030; Lost, 361 Canal Street, NYC 10013; Oh Boy, Box 36099, Los Angeles 90036; Pink Dust, Box 2428, El Segundo, CA 90245-1528; RAS, Box 42517, Washington, D.C. 20015; ROIR, 611 Broadway, NYC 10012; Select, 175 Fifth Avenue, NYC 10010; Touch & Go, Box 433, Dearborn, Ml 48121; Wild, Box 800222, Lincoln, NE 68501.