PRIME CUT

PRIME CUT

T-BONE BURNETT (MCA/Dot)

by

Billy Altman

With a client list that has included, over the last few years, the likes of Elvis Costello, Los Lobos, Marshall Crenshaw, the BoDeans and Peter Case, TBone Burnett has rather emphatically established himself as one of the most important producers fighting the good fight for rock ’n’ roll in the 1980s. But if Burnett’s name is only familiar to you as a producer, then you’ve been missing half of a great story, because on those all too rare occasions when Mr. Burnett decides to make his own records, we get to hear one of the most important artists fighting the good fight as well. How good a fight does T-Bone Burnett wage? Well, his new album is one of the finest LPs I’ve heard all year. And how interesting a fight does T-Bone Burnett wage? Well, how does an all acoustic LP grab you?

Notice I say all acoustic, and not folk. That’s because I certainly wouldn’t categorize this record as folk, even though all the music made here comes via accordion, fiddle, dobro, stand-up bass, and un-amplified guitar. It would be a mistake to cubbyhole this record as anything—folk, country or rock. Which, is the point. Songs are songs, and music is music, and all you’ll find on this LP are good songs and good music. Good songs like “River Of Love,” “I Remember,” “Oh No Darling” and “No Love At All.” Good music like Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo’s accordion, Byron Berline’s fiddle, Billy Swan’s harmony vocals, and Jerry Douglas’s sensational dobro. And all of it anchored by the ubiquitous T-Bone.

It takes a special brand of songwriter to pen compositions as distantly related as “River Of Love” and “Oh No Darling.” The former, a haunting ballad of the strength of faith and the power of hope, features a verse that states, “There’s a river of love than runs through all time/And there’s a river of grief that runs through our lives/lt starts with the heart that’s broken in two/By the thief of belief of everything that’s true/But there’s a river of love that runs through all time.” The latter, an upbeat, carefree rocker, sports the following stanza: “Rave on, darling, rave on/l’ll buy clothes of rayon/Rave on, darling, rave on/You’ll meet me at the Sav-on.” It also takes a special brand of performer to cross-pollinate traditional musical idioms such as the one used in “Little Daughter” with the Bo Diddley beat of "Oh No Darling,” the Tex-Mex blues of “Poison Love,” or the country rock of “No Love At All.”

With a record that’s so impressive because of its overall spirit and texture, it’s probably unfair to single out too many things. Suffice to say that both Billy Swan and David Hidalgo sing beautifully in their duets with Burnett, that Douglas really is, as Burnett calls him, the “World War III of dobro players,” and that, in a better world, “No Love At All” would be a crossover

country/pop hit single for, say, the Everly Brothers. And that it is sincerely hoped that it isn’t another three years until T-Bone Burnett’s next album. He’s just too good to be this scarce.

A-HA

Scoundrel Days (Warner Bros.)

A-Ha are so totally nellie that, after the first couple tracks on their new LP floated out of the speakers, I had this sudden urge to drop everything and engage in some activity with substance, like wringing my hands over deadly asbestos or seriously considering the very concept of Show Poultry. And I’d launch into the whole evil-of-banality rap right here and now if they weren’t so darned good!

One biggie in their favor is the severely likeable way they’re always wagging their little tails of the unexpected. You almost never hear any surprises on records these days. Most groups’ recordings sound like something that belonged to the previous occupant.

Not A-Ha. Their songs will start off putt-putting harmlessly through some slightly dark minor chords and—just when you’re ready to relegate the tune to Jeopardy’s (admittedly) groundbreaking “Who Cares?’’ category—they’ll slip into this real wiggle-bunny major stuff and you’re hooked. Their big smasheroo (don’t ask me!) was the perfect example of the group’s alien tub enclosures method of songwriting, but there’s plenty more where that came from.

The title cut (go ahead, look it up) uses A-Ha surprise therapy to incur massive catchiness. I like it a lot. The way they heave them minors around reminds me mucho of the famed Left Banke. (Quick history lesson: the guys who did “Walk Away Renee” in the mid-’60s, a real beaut of a tune later ruined by about 92 other groups—I mean, the Four Tops?'.—who brutalized it to the point of utter mediocrity and for which I had to go back and play “Scoundrel Days” four or five more times), which I never do (kiss of death to concentration) just to soak in the melody and admire the arrangement. First a layer of keyboard, then a layer of synth shimmer, then a layer of smooth vocals and finally a light frosting of actual strings. Hey! They just made a petit four!

Plenty more good stuff like that and only a couple arfskies. “Swing Of Things” uses the exact same Boo!/Gotcha! moves only with a little mechanized rhythm tossed in, ditto “Cry Wolf” on the more upbeat flip side. Plus still more surprises like the Abba-meets-English-musichall “Maybe Maybe” and the harpsichord to power chord switcheroo in “Manhatten Skyline.”

Perhaps you were wondering, as was I, whether these nutty Norwegians could write words in anything other than the most hopelessly phonetic English. I’ll admit that, when I first looked at the cover and saw titles like “Soft Rains Of April” and “We’re Looking For The Whales,” I was waiting to pounce bigtime and compare their lyrics to “Peking wall jargon’’ a'nd “pidgin cuneiform,” phrases I’d stockpiled for such an occasion. Then they had to screw up everything and come through with cool lines like “I found angels/Beached outside your door” and/or “You can give in, but you can’t give up.” Thanks a bunch, A-Ha.

All was not lost though, as other cuts produced several lyrics that should definitely begin, “Dear Certs..." such as Dear Certs, “I don’t want to cry again/I don’t want to say goodbye” or Dear Certs, “You see things in the depths of my eyes/That my love’s run dry.” C'mon guys—want love? Get Close-Up!

So go ahead and buy this album. It’s about as Big Beat as good shopping weather, but if you like the kind of songs that you keep hearing over and over even when you’re not playing the record, then I say rah-rah for A-Ha!

Rick Johnson

OMD

The Pacific Age (A&M)

Not all that is wrong with modern pop is wrong with OMD. They don’t try desperately to look like badasses of the most fearsome sort every time a photographer points a camera at them, and they don’t write about how gigantic their dicks are, or about the treachery and loathsomeness of women.

Still, much of what is wrong with modern pop is wrong with OMD, and I’m not even alluding to Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark’s being the worst band name in the history of popular music—a burdensome mouthful that defies smooth recitation, let alone correct spelling. Rather, my beef is that they’re yet another white British synthesizer disco group that’s approximately 20 parts production to one part talent, a triumph of packaging over content, a whole lot of skillfully tarted up nuttin’.

And the singer’s perfectly frightful. God hands out the wonderful voices as inequitably as good looks—lots of assholes get ’em, while lots of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet are denied. I can’t say for sure whether OMD’s Andy McCluskey is one of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, but I can assure you that he didn’t get one of the great voices or even one of the interesting bad ones. What he got, to get to the nitty-gritty, is a twerp’s. And then he compounds it by crooning!

In a more sensible age, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphries, OMD’s prime movers, would have hired some golden-throated young Adonis to do the singing for them, and stayed behind the scenes stealing the goldenthroated young Adonis’s royalties. But in this age of digital delays and harmonizers and MIDI and God-knows-what-elseby-the-time-this-reaches-print, they’re right out there front and center, and we’re all the poorer for it.

The Pacific Age isn’t without its moments, mind you. “Flame Of Hope” has an appealing lilt, “Forever Live And Die” an engaging Staxish rhythm groove, and the chorus of the fruity Big Ballad “We Love You” a perfectly gorgeous melody that I’d be proud to have composed myself. (Just imagine Midge Ure, whose “If I Was” remains the genre’s reigning masterpiece, doing it!) But “Goddess Of Love,” apparently about a nymphomaniac, is an absolute shoo-in for firstballot induction into the Lame Hall of Fame. And “Southern,” in which various Martin Luther King, Jr. orations are semi-heard through much big bam boom, is far worse than lame. I don’t know what you might call using a martyr’s voice to try to make an otherwise undistinguished disco instrumental seem to have something very momentous to say, but I know that I call it crass, not to mention incredibly pretentious.

God, what am I doing? How can I have forgotten that these selfsame geezers were responsible for the sublime “So In Love,” one of my favorite tracks of 1986, McCluskey s limp falsetto notwithstanding? (If the Supremes had recorded it in 1966, there would have been no wars, plagues, or famines since. Joy would reign everywhere.) What if Andy and Paul, Clive and Nigel, Mick, Graham, and Trevor, ladies and gentlemen, Spin and Marty, the Captain and Tenille, and the other OMDs were to read this and quit the pop business in embarrassment?

That’s a possibility I’ll just have to live with.

John Mendelssohn

LONE JUSTICE

Shelter (Geffen)

Just my luck. Shelter is a stinker, and the thought of having to expound on that opinion simply bores me to distraction. mean, there are so may other culturally uplifting things I could be doing: regaling my friends with highlights from His Way, listening to Tommy Keene capture a moment of Raspberries magic on Run Now, daydreaming about Lulu, the wild thing that makes my heart sing in Something Wild (she moves me).

Mick was right—you can’t always get what you want. When my editor called with the monthly assignment, I requested T-Bone Burnett, only to find an esteemed colleague had beaten me to it. After hearing what remains to be covered, I narrow it down to a choice between Debbie Harry and Lone Justice. Now I go way back with Debbie Harry (not to the point of being horizontal but pretty far back). I even offered her comfort once when another lame Blondie performance brought scorn from the crowd and tears to her eyes. But let’s face it—her heyday went thataway and Rockbird is about as trivial a record as you’re gonna hear this year. (And how can a song called “French Kissin” from an alleged blonde bombshell sound so puckered out?)

So I took Lone Justice. I’d been pleasantly surprised when I saw them open for U2 on their last tour. Their country leanings had some real bite to them. What’s more, they knew how to rock. Plus lead singer Maria McKee had that extra touch of oomph and came across quite vivaciously as she banged her tambourine with sassy abandon.

Sure their debut was a bit of a letdown, but there was definitely something there, and “Ways To Be Wicked” was a definite pick to click. And Maria hadn’t lost the oomph. So imagine my distress when I spent some time with Shelter, and found it to be a millimeter short of being totally worthless and downright turgid. You can’t even blame it on the sophomore jinx because the first one was no great shakes to begin with.

Where to start? Production (by Little Steven, Jimmy lovine and the band) is state of the AOR. Van Zandt and lovine, who both should know a whole lot better, have settled for bland-out overkill and encouraged McKee to turn herself into a cowpunk Ronstadt. In the words of Iggy: blah, blah, blah.

The songs are astoundingly consistent in their level of mediocrity and I’ll be damned if can get one of them to stay in my head once the turntable stops spinning. We’re talking absolute drudgery with the exception of “I Found Love,” a semispirited romp which proves that Little Steven should have cowritten everything (although “Shelter” and “Belfry” show signs of his well running dry).

As a songwriter, Ms. McKee makes a wonderful tambourine player. Her efforts are buried in a landslide of pedestrian claptrap and nauseating “sensitivity.” Get down and get with it, girl. Whoever told you that being shrill, strident, and whiny makes for powerful emoting should be thrown in a rubber room and forced to listen to “Beacon” and “The Gift” until they croak. And where, oh where, did that sassy abandon get off to?

Well, enough of this overblown malarkey. I’ve had enough. It’s time to sleep, perchance to dream. Or as America’s favorite sleepwalker, Ed Norton would say: “Luuu-luuu...”

Craig Zeller