CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

CHRISTGAU CONSUMER GUIDE

ROBERT CHRISTGAU

MAHMOUD AHMED "Era Mala Mala”

(Crammed Disc import)

Because taste leads to knowledge, I enjoy fair familiarity with the West African music that’s second cousin to rock ’n’ roll and none with its distant relatives in North Africa and the Middle East. But where knowledge ends, taste rules. Ahmed is a singer of indubitable authority, and maybe an album of the “many standards” he’s contributed to “modern Ethiopian music” would expand my horizons. Or maybe this is that album—I don’t know. I do know that soon I lose the charge I get from the lead cuts, generated less by the “strange, almost Indonesian-sounding scales” of the vocals than by the two-sax horn section, which (maybe because it utilizes those scales) could be Afro-Brilliant Corners or illtempered synthesizer or avant-garde blues. For tastes that run to the Master Musicians of Joujouka and Om Kalsoum. B +

ANITA BAKER “Rapture”

(Elektra)

Having listened far more than natural inclination dictated, l’$s become actively annoyed with this vocal watershed. From its lounge-jazz beat to its conscious avoidance of distracting lyrical detail, it’s all husky, burnished mood, the fulfillment of the quiet storm format black radio devised to lure staider customers away from white-bread temptations like soft rock and easy listening. God knows it's more soulful, and sexier too, but that’s all it is—a reification of the human voice as vehicle of an expression purer than expression ever ought to be.B -

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN (Pitch-a-Tent)

Without benefit of a “Skinheads” or a “Bad Trip” this is the most convincing of

the three very good albums they’ve dashed off in a year and a half—16 tracks, eclectic in a panfolkrock mode that now seems unselfconscious if not inevitable, even the in-

strumentals equipped with words of one sort or another sometimes. Their stance is bemused when it’s not just spaced out, and their “Interstellar Overdrive” is too conceptual for my tastes. But I reserve the right to read good politics into the likes of “Joe Stalin’s Cadillac” (is LBJ’s Cadillac is Somoza’s Cadillac is General Pinochet’s Cadillac is my Cadillac I’d like to drive it off a bridge has anyone seen the bridge). So far their productivity seems proof against the desperate indulgences that can overcome talented bands with dodgy commercial prospects. They’re an encouraging aberration in a bad time. I wish them a tour bus w/driver that never lets them down. A

ORNETTE COLEMAN'S PRIME TIME

“Opening the Caravan off Dreams”

(Caravan Of Dreams)

Only the second LP by the harmolodic funk originators, this was recorded live at the well-appointed Fort Worth avant-garde emporium in 1985, and it’s a live album for sure—it lacks the studio-engendered begining-middle-end that focuses Of Human Feelings and for that matter Metheny/Coleman’s Song X. When it threatens to break altogether “free,” its risks seem more like entropy than thrills and chills. But it’s a live album featuring one of the great improvisors, as well as musicians who never sound more authoritative than when following his orders. A-

DON DIXON

"Most Off The Girls Like To Danes But Only Some Of The Boys Like To”

(Enigma)

The R.E.M.,etc. producer’s semilegendary status as leader of Arrogance got even less credence from me than from everybody who’d never heard of them, because I’d heard them: arena-rock as club sandwich. But it’s his band experience that powers his good little Southern pop record. Not only does he write hooky songs with a twist—my favorites involve a bisexual and a one-night stand—half a dozen stand out, and most of the rest plus two covers are fun at least—but he sings them with the kind of ersatz soul that floors houses and counterbalances his Farfisa riffs with compressed guitar spectacles. In short, he ain’t cute.A-

FLIPPER

"Public Flipper Limited” (Subterranean)

A live double recorded mostly in ’80 and ’82, when their fuck-it wasn’t yet a defeat, this has the spirit. But though they were anarchists they were no fools, so they put their best material on their first and forever best album, leaving the profusion of originals finally available here to bring up the rear. B +

BOB GELDOF

"Deep In The Heart Of Nowhere” (Atlantic)

As a struggling front man he had a weakness for bathos; as a disappointed Nobel laureate he makes me miss Harry Chapin. On and on he blathers, a Bowie clone with glossomania, rolling out additional songs and verses for cassette and CD after he had more than enough for 12 inches of vinyl. Yet though he knows far more about world suffering than you or I, he’s almost incapable of writing about it. All he proves is that when you dwell on suffering you get pompous, something all too many rock ’n’ rollers have already noticed. C

DEBBIE HARRY "Rockblrd”

(Geffen)

It’s her achievements and her curse that just listening to the record you’d think she never went away. Vocal technique and vocal identity are sharper than when she withdrew from the fray five years ago, and the songs are brasher and more insouciant than on The Hunter or KooKoo or even AutoAmerican. The sound is less distinctive only because the world is now overrun with the dance-rock Blondie made possible—just as it’s overrun with cartoon sexpots carrying tunes. Not one of whom has put out an album with this much pizzazz in years. But whose collective existence gives her a larger identity problem she refuses to confront. B +

JAMES

"Stutter”

(Sire)

These Lancashire lads have staked out their own kitchen garden on guitar-bassand-drums’ densely cultivated common. Folkedelic with hints of postpunkpop, it’s a place pleasant, unkempt, and all their own, but not private enough to suit them—hence their wry, well-meaning, angst-ridden, and ultimately impenetrable lyrics. B

MARTI JONES "Match Game”

(A&M)

Seeking airplay worthy of Bonnie Raitt if not Linda Ronstadt, Don Dixon slowed her down a little, to less than no avail—the airplay failed to materialize (or whatever airplay does), and the tempos revealed the reluctance of perfectly hooky modern songwriters to say something and/or the inability of a perfectly attentive modern interpreter to make you ignore it. I know the world is confusing enough to warrant indirection. But when you’re going nowhere, do so either fast or in fine style. B

TURN TO PAGE 57

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21

ORAN “JUICE” JONES (Def Jam)

Supposedly, this is the lowdown on love men: when his lady ventures off her pedestal, Juice drops the sensitive act and treats her like a gangster. And love him or hate him, he’s about talking, not singing. I mean, personally, I find his brand loyalties and “y’unnerstand??”s kinda revolting, but he talks ’em like he walks ’em, so I can understand why hipper folks think they’re hilarious parodies of the player’s life and line. What I don’t get is why any lady should be fooled by his sensitive act—he’s got the falsetto to negotiate the second-rate Chi-Lites songs his Taps are buried in, but not to put them across. Which makes the concept a cheat and the album a bore. C +

NEW ORDER “Brotherhood”

(Qwest)

I never knew why their definitive dancetrance impressed me more than it moved me, and now I don’t know why it has me rocking out of my chair and grinning foolishly as I scour the supermarkets for chorizo. The tempos are a touch less stately, the hooks a touch less subliminal. Bernard Albrecht’s vocals have taken on so much affect they’re humane. And the joke closer softens up a skeptic like me to the pure, physically exalting sensation of the music. A -

THE SMITHEREENS “Especially For You”

(Engima)

All pop propaganda to the contrary, Pat DiNizio’s no surefire songwriter—he’s only modestly hooky, and even the lyrics he hits encapsulate romantic situations you already know the ins and outs of. Takes some singer to score consistently with such songs, and not even pop propagandists are palming off that lie. B-

THE SMITHS “The Queen Is Dead”

(Sire)

After disliking their other albums instantly, I was confused enough by my instant attraction to table the question, especially since I had no stomach for the comparisons I knew the answer would entail. And indeed, I still can’t stand the others. But here Morrissey wears his wit on his sleeve, dishing the queen like Johnny Rotten never did and kissing off a day-job boss who’s no Mr. Selleck. This makes it easier to go alone on his moonier escapades, like when he reveals that looks and fame don’t guarantee a good social life. Which gives you time to notice the tunes, the guitars, the backup munchkins. B +

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS (Bar/None)

Two catchy weirdos, 18 songs, and the hits just keep on coming in an exuberantly annoying show of creative superabundance. Their secret is that as unmediated pop postmodernists they can be themselves stealing from anywhere, modulating without strain or personal commitment from hick to nut to nerd. Like the cross-eyed bear in the regretful but not altogether kind “Hide Away Folk Family,” their “shoes are laced with irony,” but that doesn’t doom them to artschool cleverness or never meaning what they say. Their great subject is the information overload that lends these songs their form. They live in a world where “Everything Right Is Wrong Again” and “Youth Culture Killed My Dog.” A