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Whenever I feel bad about myself, life, anything up to and including the sum total of all mankind's contributions to the world we inhabit, I plan a trip to a zoo. It cheers me up no end. There's one not that far from where I live, about thirty miles to the south; it isn't a very good one, but it has a penguin pond, and it's the one I grew up with - I must have gone on at least three school trips there between the ages of five and eleven. So, if work ever seems like something I'd just rather not face at the moment, I phone in sick, jump in the car, and off I motor. If I want to splash out, maybe I'll shell out for a trip down to London - not far by train - and visit the zoo there. And, if I find myself, for whatever reason, stuck in a strange city for a few hours, I get me down to the local tourist information office and inquire whether the place has a zoo. If it doesn't, then I think a good deal less of the place, especially if it's a big one - what's the point of channeling millions of pounds worth of tax-payers' money into 'multi-media service centers' and 'multi-purpose information complexes' if you can't get your act together sufficiently to build a lousy zoo?

Now, I know some people have problems with zoos, and it is true that the cheapest, worst run ones are depressing places, standing symbols that there are still some people out there who haven't yet got it, who still don't see that, in life, there is one way of behaving - the correct way - and then there is the other way. And even the most illustrious institutions no doubt have shameful episodes in their histories which they don't tell you about in the information kiosk. The modern research zoo, however, is a brilliant achievement - a sort of all-round apology for screwing around with the natural environment so much. Of course, it won't be much of a consolation if we preserve all the endangered species in museums whilst they perish in the real world, but at least these places demonstrate that someone, somewhere, is having the correct thoughts.

What I like most about modern zoos, however, is the spectacle they offer of creatures who, unlike any other creatures in the whole of our planet's history, are actually *happy*. Face it, to be really happy you have to be really dumb, much dumber than a human being can ever be. When I look back on all the things that, in the last thirty years, have made me unhappy, they've always been because either myself or someone dear to me has started thinking too much. My divorce could, I believe, be very easily explained as the inevitable result of two reasonably smart people each thinking they were much smarter than the other one was, and attempting to find complicated answers to really very straight-forward questions. Only animals have the capacity for true happiness, yet only in potential - if it weren' for mankind's boundless sense of generosity - which goes hand in hand with, and is probably a component of, his equally boundless but much better-known selfishness - they'd never be able to achieve it. In the wild, animals don't have much time for indulging their past-times, they're far too busy hunting, running away or sleeping around - but along comes man, puts 'em in a cage, and suddenly all their problems are solved. No need to hunt or be hunted, because *they* are in there, you're in here, and all your food is provided for you by kindly keepers. As I said, it wasn't always like this, and it isn't like this all the time even now, but in the best places it is. And it allows the animals to indulge their greatest passion: sleep. Last time I was at London zoo, I looked in on the pygmy hippo, just to see how he was getting on. I couldn't find him - he wasn't in his pond, where he usually was. Eventually I located him, tucked away in a bushy corner, fast asleep. Later, a couple of hours later, I checked in on him again, and there he was, still fast a'slumber - he hadn't budged an inch. At that moment, I envied him deeply - what I wouldn't give to spend the majority of my time blissfully unconcious. Of course, in the end I'd much rather be free than happy, but that's only because I'm so smart I'm a moron, just like everyone who's reading this story is - I don't think animals have that problem. Except for whales - they're quite smart, and anyway they are much too big to put in zoos, and look what's happening to them - unless we nuke Hiroshima again, or declare war on Norway, how are we going to save them? If you are free - if you live in the harsh world of real-life market forces, the ones that govern all the important things in life, from love on down - then you have to accept that at some point your are going to lose, perhaps so badly that you may never win again. I feel like that most of the time, and if the whales don't feel like that yet they soon will. The Flaming Lips got it all wrong - the animals didn't stay in the zoo that Christmas because they didn't want to be patronised - they stayed there because, against all odds, they no longer had to worry about winning and losing, love and loss, and had the luxury to just sleep and not care. They were just too polite to say so, that's all.

Those who have read my review of Kings of Convenience's 'Quiet is the New Loud' album will probably be under the impression that I do not much care for gentle, acoustic singer-songwriter-type music, and it is true that I do indeed view this sort of music with a good deal of suspicion. However, like any musical genre, if the thing is done well, it is worthy of the serious listener's attention. Aspiring acoustic troubadours would do well to give this album a few spins to hear how this sort of music should be done.

Except that they can't. This album comes from an early part of Paul Simon's career - in the hiatus between Simon and Garfunkel's break-up following 'Wednesday Morning 3 AM' and their resurrection by the electrified version of 'Sound of Silence', I believe - and Paul would later become so embarrassed by it that he had the original master-tapes destroyed, or something; in any case, I doubt that it has ever had a CD release, and is probably quite hard to come across. This isn't really very surprising - in the liner notes, Paul observes frankly that 'the songs I write today will not belong to me tomorrow': clearly, this is someone who is highly self-critical of their own work, and who would almost certainly find the songs here contained - or, rather, the *versions* of the songs here contained - painfully immature. The very reasons, however, that would make the 'mature' artist of later years cringe, are the reasons that should make the average listener warm to this album. The majority of the songs on here would be re-recorded by Simon and Garfunkel when the duo became big, but the versions contained here are far more affecting, far more appropriate, than their better-known successors.

You see, these songs - besides being catchy and amazingly pretty, virtues that they possess no matter what production values are piled on them - only attain their true potential when sung solo, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar. I don't really think that S&G ever really got the hang of complex arrangements and high-quality production - these songs simply sound much more *comfortable*, sure of themselves, in a purely acoustic form. Neither is the absence of Garfunkel's voice all that much of a drawback - okay, so Simon doesn't possess as good a voice as Garfunkel, but so what? These songs positively benefit from being inexpertly performed - after all, they are inexpertly written. For all that there is the occasional good line buried in these tracks, they are probably outweighed by the clunky, the awkward, the gauche. What comes across on the more polished S&G versions as heavy-handed and pretentious, however, here sounds exactly like what it is - the confused, yet heartfelt, words of a sensitive, lonely, yet talented young songwriter. Put simply, there is tons more *feeling* here than on anything else Paul Simon has done.

Take album opener 'I Am Rock'. I've never felt that the S&G version did justice to the lyric's depth of bitterness and despair -after all, how can a song about loneliness really succeed if it is sung as a duet? That way, the performance cuts against the song's message, thus making it an open invitation to misinterpretation. Here, however, the singer really does sound alone, and almost defiant of the fact - after all, the phrase 'I am a rock', particularly in the context of the 1960s, sounds like a revolutionary rallying cry, a slogan of the civil rights movement. Yet the singer isn't engaged in any movement set to remake society, he's cut off from society, rebuking John Donne by saying 'actually, some men *are* islands - I am one of them'. Of course, this is perhaps a bit melodramatic, but obviously it isn't contrived, it's the way the singer actually feels.

Likewise, 'Sound of Silence' sounds far more menacing in a purely acoustic form, with Paul, in the later stages of the song, beating a rhythm on his guitar to mark time - the only vaguely percussive sound on the album. 'A Simply Desultory Philippic' (here subtitled 'How I was Lyndon Johnson'd Into Submission', rather than Robert MacNamara'd) is unsure of itself, not sure whether it wants to be a proper Dylan-y, joke-y sort of song, or if it wants to be making fun *of* Dylan, and there are two generic protest songs written by someone called P. Kane, but apart from these slight glitches, this is an album that would be a useful blue-print for anyone thinking of taking up an acoustic guitar. The important thing is to remember to put some melodies in (yes, Kings Of Convenience, I am looking at you, don't think you'll get away that easily - wherever it is you've got to in recent years).  

 

Charles Mingus was probably the foremost jazz composer of the 'modern' jazz era - by which I mean the late 50s and the 60s. Now, for many people the term 'jazz composer' seems a slightly oxymoronic one, and the exact nature of jazz composition is outlined by Mingus himself in the liner notes to this album. He explains that a jazz composer is never going to produce a piece that sounds exactly like the one he hears in his head, because the right mixture of classical restraint - whereby the instrumentalists play exactly what's written in the score by the composer - and jazz 'feeling' cannot be achieved: if the musicians are classically trained, they'll play what's in front of them, but it won't *feel* like jazz, yet if the musicians are jazzmen, then by definition their individual personalities are going to have an effect on the piece as a whole, through the medium of improvisation. Therefore, the role of a jazz composer is to create the framework, the broad outline of the piece, its main theme and its progressions, within which the instrumentalists can do their own thing. The results are more structured - or, rather, more intricately structured - than the average jazz tune, but still have the authentic jazz feel to them.

This album is a very fine one, almost a perfect balance between the experimental and the traditional. The relatively large number of players on this album - seven, including Mingus himself on bass - allows a rich polyphonic sound to be developed, with a high degree of call and response and over-lapping instrumental themes. To me, the appeal of this sound is two-fold - it maintains a high level of interest in the listener, and it has a remarkably broad emotional palette, whilst imbuing each mood with a distinctly Mingus feel. This feeling, to me, can best be described as a feeling of drunkenness. Whatever emotion is summoned - be it exultation in the the case of the album opener 'Better Git It In Your Soul', or sorrow in 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' - there is a certain woozy atmosphere that brings to mind someone in the later stages of inebriation. When Mingus deploys his musical gift for satirical purposes, on the album highlight 'Fables of Faubus' - the reference is to the 1950s governor of Arkansas who tried to prevent school desegregation in Little Rock - he is able to carry out a brilliant act of character-assassination - the menacing tune is an amazing sound portrait, creating in the listener's head an image of a drunken, corrupt Southern politician, with no recourse to words being necessary.

This album is also, I would say, a good beginning point for jazz novices, as, whilst very much a post-bebob, and hence modern, jazz album, it also seems to maintain strong links to jazz's origins. For instance, the driving, gospel-tinged 'Better Git It In Your Soul' possesses a main theme that is the very spirit of New Orleans itself, whilst such tracks as 'Pussy Cat Dues' and 'Jelly Roll' (after Jelly Roll Morton, one of the founding fathers of jazz) in their different ways - one languorously, the other cheerfully - affirm the album's place in a jazz continuum. This is strengthened by the number of tracks which are tributes to proceeding jazz greats. This is not that surprising, for jazz has always been notoriously respectful to the members of its pantheon, yet even so the number is quite high here: 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' is a tribute to Lester Young, 'Open Letter to Duke' one to Duke Ellington, 'Bird Calls' to Charlie Parker, plus the above mentioned 'Jelly Roll'. 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' is a particularly effecting track, whilst 'Bird Calls' is a more experimental number, opening in a noisy cacophony of squealing saxes and horns before settling into a strong, aggressive groove, calling on the spirit of Parker as a guiding light for its experimental flourishes. 'Open Letter' I'm less keen on, as it is a mini-suite of older Mingus tunes that don't quite work together and come to a slightly anti-climatic - though quite cheerful - latin-tinged halt. 

I could go on about this album for much longer, but I think I've conveyed a general impression of what it sounds like. There aren't really any stinkers on it, though, as this is a CD remaster, we get the inevitable bonus tracks, which, though pretty good on their own merits, don't quite stand up to the best tracks on the album itself, and thus form a slightly anti-climatic finish. On the plus side, CD technology means that these tunes are now issued in unedited form, which is just as it should be - having never heard the original, edited versions, I can't imagine these tracks being a second shorter. So, in conclusion, an album of jazz at its mid-century peak, with promise of the future and contact with the past both...um....present.        

At the moment, the music scene in the UK seems to be in a fairly robust way. After the relative drought of recent times, we actually do seem to have a number of pretty good bands enjoying a measure of commercial success. However, if there is a worry concerning these bands, it is that, though less ideologically backward-looking than the Britpop groups of yesteryear, they don't appear to be exactly brimming over with originality. They all seem to take their template from the post-punk New Wave movement - and whilst this obviously leaves a pretty wide variety of types to choose from, it does mean that for most of the current bands you can easily point to a number of ancestor bands whose approaches to music they appear to have borrowed from liberally. I like Razorlight, for instance, purely as songsmiths, but they have to be about the least original band since Oasis. Likewise, someone like the Kaiser Chiefs, though their more arty type of New Wave has a somewhat broader range of influences, are still obvious descendants of Roxy Music, XTC and the like. For me personally, I'm starting to get a little concerned about this lack of new ideas. A few days ago something happened that acutely crystalised the problem for me. I was watching a music channel, when suddenly a song came on, moody, with a chiming, New Wave-ish riff - it sounded like something by The Departure, or rather, seeing as The Departure are quite good, one of their paler bandwagon-hopping brethren. Know who it was? Simple Minds, their new single. It was a pretty dull song, but what scared me was the riff - it wouldn't have sounded out of place in any song by the current crop of critically acclaimed bands. Have we really reached the stage where it becomes hard to distinguish bright up-and-comers from washed-up eighties dinosaurs? If so, then we are in a dark place indeed.

However, The Futureheads. These blokes are part of this new crop of bands, and I've chosen to review their debut album because I think they demonstrate the problem we're facing quite well, simply because they do posses a degree of originality - thus demonstrating all the more clearly the strength of their main debt to the past. In this case, their main ancestor band is The Jam; despite the difference in accents (The Futureheads being from the North-East, The Jam from Woking) the two bands do sound uncannily similar. There are, however, a number of distinguishing differences. Firstly, in terms of the lyrics. Though I've never considered Paul Weller to be my particular hero, or his brand of gauche social commentary the quintessence of rock lyricism, compared to The Futureheads he's Bob Dylan: lyrically these songs barely exist. Of course, with this sort of music lyrics are hardly the point, as long as the songs are fast and furious. Secondly, in terms of song structure: whilst Weller seemed to consider the meat-and-two-veg, verse-chorus-verse-chorus approach to songwriting good enough, The Futureheads are congenitally incapable, it appears, of writing a straightforwardly structured song. Though only two of the songs here exceed three minutes in length, the number of melodic ideas compressed into each one is highly impressive. On first listen these fast, loud songs pass by in an ecstatic rush, not leaving much time to consider their internal intricacy. On repeated listens, this complexity is better appreciated, though some of the component pieces turn out to be either slight or borrowed. The third way in which these songs differ from their Jam ancestors is in terms of vocal interplay. The Futureheads have a passion for ensemble singing, call and response, and multiple-part harmonies, which, together with the melodic inventiveness, helps to give them an added layer of complexity. These vocal skills are best shown on 'Danger of the Water', the only track where the group turn the amps off and settle for an almost acapella tune, only accompanied by a gentle electric piano.

On the whole, therefore, this album does contain a quota of originality. However, these distinguishing touches merely highlight the central dependence on a past group's ideas. I'm worried that perhaps the level of originality displayed on this album is all we'll get from now on: old ideas served up in slightly new combinations. This worry aside, however, the album is pretty enjoyable. I don't find it quite as exciting now as when I first got it - there are quite a lot of tracks here, and some of the weaker ones don't really stand up to repeated listenings - but it certainly has its share of good tunes: the aforementioned 'Danger of the Water', a rousing cover of Kate Bush's 'Hounds of Love', and, probably the best song, 'Decent Days and Nights', which is an encapsulation of what is good about this album - fast, twisty, anthemic, loud, and with an insanely catchy riff. The lyrics are still a bit shit, though.  

Hi there. If you are reading this, it means my live-journal is, as of now, up and running again after a slight absence. Now, on to the reviews...

This isn't exactly a review, but more of a general appreciation, not confined to any particular series of this amazingly funny tv show. I came to 'Scrubs' quite late - I'd catch an episode of it every now and then, laugh myself unconscious, but never got down to actually watching it in any serious way. So, when the DVD of series one was recently released, I went and bought it for myself as a sort of end of university present, and watched all of the episodes in about two days. Some people may say that this is televisual gluttony, but when you are faced with such a glorious confection as Scrubs, the temptation to wolf it all down in one sitting is irresistible. Nor, I think, *should* it be resisted - the chance to watch back-to-back episodes of your favourite show is one that people all too rarely have, and it is ungrateful to chance or providence to pass up such opportunities.

So, why is Scrubs the funniest thing on television at the moment? The first reason has to be the quality of the writing, which is marked by a love not just of the cracking one-liners that American comedies traditionally excel at, but also of the more surreal, sustained flights of whimsy that you find in good British comedies. This last characteristic is best seen in the mammoth displays of sarcasm that the wonderfully damaged Dr. Cox indulges in, when an initially phrase of deprecation will be exploded and twisted until it assumes the nature of a grotesque, before coming crushing down upon his hapless victim. There are several of these moments in each episode, and they stand up well to repeated viewings in ways that one-liners don't always do, because the density of language is so rich the joke can support itself for that much longer

The second reason is the absence of a laughter soundtrack. This is a vital necessity nowadays for almost any comedy that wants to aspire to greatness. Yet network big-wigs were not particularly comfortable with this notion, and it seems that, in the first series at any rate, they needed to be placated by the inclusion of various cartoony sound affects. The review of the DVD box-set on The Onion AV Club was rather snooty about this, claiming that the cure was worse than the disease. The only response to that is incredulity. Can it really be contended that the sort of over-the-top, near-continuous canned laughter tracks that makes 'Friends' or 'Will and Grace' practically unwatchable by any sane human being, can it really be contended that they are preferable to the occasional whoosh-whoosh noise or cartoony double-take that crops up three or four times per episode (and only then for the first series)? The absence of a laughter track allows a far more off-the-cuff, less stage-y acting style, making the jokes funnier by about a ten-fold - with jokes this good, you don't need cues to tell you when to laugh.

The third reason is the great ensemble acting. Like a live-action version of the Simpsons, Scrubs possesses an engaging cast of characters, all of them brilliantly acted. It is very hard to pick a favourite, but if I had to, I think I would go with either The Janitor or Ted the lawyer, both of them relatively minor characters in terms of their number of lines, but oh...what lines!

A final reason, oddly enough, is actually the show's setting. Scrubs is, as its name might suggest, set in a hospital, and despite the numerous fantasy sequences and funny noises, it is this show, rather than any of the more straight-lace medical drama series, that (apparently) reflects what a hospital is really like, down to the insightful little details, such as the fact that it is the dumber the person, the better the surgeon, smart people spending too much time thinking to be absolutely top-notch. The characters often have to deal with tough moral decisions, and of course the whole running-battle between Dr. Cox and Chief Medical Supervisor Bob Kelso is a pretty strong statement about the health care system in the U.S. (Cox wanting to help patients even if they lack medical insurance, Kelso simply looking at the narrow financial situation).

Of course, the show isn't perfect: as with any show produced under the factory system of writing, some episodes don't quite measure up to the show's own high standards, and Zach Braff's narration can get a little grating at times, but overall, this is still the funniest shoe on television by some way.  

Jazz-punk. Punk-jazz. Are these terms too pretentious? Well, if so, I apologise, but I'm going to have to stick with them for now, as they seem to me to be the only adaquate terms we can use to describe this album. We can't, really, call it 'punk' pure and simple - any definition of punk that can include the 10-minute title track is obviously one that's so inclusive as to be all but useless as a critical term. I declare 'jazz punk' my definition of choice because, especially on the title track, that seems to be the best description of what is going on here - a catchy, albeit slow, tune, with a great central riff and tons of dark imagery delivered in a classic New York punk sneer, that around the five-minute mark - and it's clear by now that we've already overstepped the boundaries of your classic, four-square punk rock, by about three and a half minutes, in fact - turns into a long, impressionistic, hypnotic guitar solo, before reaching a throbbing, pounding climax at around the 8 minute mark, and then drops away into a gentle wash of piano and a guitar that seems to be imitating a fife or something equally 18th century, fades to silence, and then...with a kick, the drums re-enter, followed by bass, and the whole thing comes to a conclusion with a reprise of the first verse. It is, without a doubt - well, none from me, at any rate - one of the greatest songs ever written. Although there is much more to this album than the title track, I'm going to stay with this song for a little while longer, and explain why, exactly, I would put it near the top of my list of songs that must be heard - *must* be, I tell you - if you want to now what was going on in popular music in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

I don't want to appear to be a cynic, but I think there is a strong case to be made that this one song establishes the limits of what can be produced within the rock form, music-wise, in that it experiments just enough that we are still in perfectly recognisable rock territory. Try and push the boundaries any further, and we leave rock behind. No, wait, that's an absolutely awful argument. Forget it. Well, don't forget it, exactly, but...let me rephrase it. If you experiment any more than this, you are probably still within rock, but you have passed over into the avant-garde - this is the most experimental rock can be whilst still being *popular* (at least potentially). Now, this doesn't mean that rock is exhausted as a form of popular music - just because we've established what the boundaries are, doesn't mean that we've fully explored everything *within* those boundaries - but it does mean that rock music, narrowly defined, doesn't really hold any surprises anymore. Now, how do I support my thesis? After all, it's not as if I know anything about music in a technical sense, so how do I make my case? Well, by digressing even further than I already have, and taking you, dear reader, into the dark heart of that seventies Frankenstein....PROG ROCK! (Note: what follows is only tangentially connected to the rest of the review).

'Progressive Rock and the Myth of Artistic Adventurism'

I have to admit, when I hear a prog record, I take a certain guilty pleasure, just as I get a certain guilty pleasure when VH2 decides to play 'Sweet Child Of Mine' for about the nine-hundredth time in a single week. Nonetheless, when I actually sit down, think about things for a little bit, and try and construct some sort of musical 'world view' - and every reviewer worth his/her salt needs one, even if it remains unstated - I cannot view prog rock as anything other than a profound, horrible mistake. You see, to me, prog rock is music for people who want to have a serious and thoughtful taste in music, but who are crippled in this regard by a debilitating lack of patience. They want music that, from the beginning, declares its intentions to be 'serious', 'highbrow', etc., because that way there's no confusion. Take Jethro Tull's 'Thick as a Brick', for instance - that album runs no risks of being mistaken for just another ordinary, run-of-the-mill rock album. Its pretensions - and, yes, I think it right that we use that word here - to be a serious piece of art are right there on the surface for all to see. The reason that this annoys me to some extent is that it seems like an all-too-obvious way of trying to solve the problem that lies at the heart of all good popular music, by pretending that the problem simply doesn't exist. This problem is that good popular music *always* runs the risk of being mistaken for 'just' another piece of disposable popular product. Good popular art always carries that ambiguity, the tension that exists between the desire to make something that will sell and the desire to make something that will last. If you don't want to produce something that will last, then fine - you'll clog up the airwaves for your anointed hour, and then be forgotten. If you attempt to suppress the ambiguity altogether, however, as prog does, then you've removed half the intellectual interest, as well as most of the charm, from your music. In prog, every ambition is on the surface, which is why it appeals to people who lack the patience (and please note here that I'm talking about the hard-core proggers, rather than people who include prog within an overall appreciation of so-called 'classic rock') to look for the art contained within an early Beach Boys track, or a mid-period Beatles one.

Connected with this is my main charge against prog, and the whole reason that I brought up this subject in the first place. My main charge is this: prog has no right to appropriate the term 'progressive' as a description of itself. Because it really, really isn't. If you go to George Starostin's review site (which is now up and running again: link coming soon), you will find, on his essays page, his infamous first essay 'Music: Where The Hell Is It Heading Today', in which, amongst other things, the view is put forward that, until the emergence of punk, popular music had been moving, generally speaking, in a forward direction, with progressive rock being an artistic advance. With the emergence of punk, however, rock reverted to year zero, to a musical form that had already had its day back in the mid-60s with bands such as The Who, and a whole legacy of artistic advance was willfully abandoned. Now, I have to say that I'm no huge fan of most punk, so I have a certain sympathy for George's argument, but it only really works if you accept that prog actually was 'progressive' in an artistic sense; and, to be honest, I don't accept this. As I said above, prog creates the impression of being artistic and forward-looking, without actually being so. Its main, defining feature, that permeates the whole genre, is a smug collusion between artists and audience, within which each side congratulates the other on their sophistication. For the artists, prog allows them to scope display their technical proficiency - which is fatal, as an obsession with technique is the professional musician's occupational hazard, and if you give an inch in this area the bastards'll take a mile - without, unlike their base brethren in the Heavy Metal area, having to abandon their claims to artistic respectability. Indeed, prog is even worse in this regard than metal, as it also encourages the musicians to display their versatility in a number of non-rock genres. 'Look', they seem to declare, 'we're not just rockers! We can do folk, too, and here's something we nicked from Bach to prove we know our classical stuff, and we can do a bit of jazz as well - though nothing too difficult, 'cos only black people can do that free-form stuff...' The audience, meanwhile, can lap this up, indulging their taste for long, technically proficient and emotionally empty solos without feeling guilty about it, because it's - wait for it! - art.

And this is all well and good, I suppose. It's no worse, morally, then the games the Romans used to throw to entertain the masses - pure, glitzy spectacle. Nothing inherently wrong, it might be added, with bringing in musical elements from other traditions to spice things up. Except that it isn't, really, progressive. It isn't moving rock forward into bold new places. It isn't asking any interesting questions. It isn't trying to solve the riddle of how popular music can progress with its central contradiction still intact, because, as far as prog is concerned, that isn't even the question any more. You can mix styles all you want, but in the end it's a dodge, pure and simple. Ultimately, if punk hadn't come along at the right time, we'd still be living in the mid-seventies, only the music would have become even more decadent, if that be possible.

Which brings us, at last, back to 'Marquee Moon'. I call this music jazz-punk because it embodies the spirit of jazz far more than that sterile jazz-rock shit ever could. Listen to the solo that Tom Verlain plays on that track - no prog guitarist would ever have had the balls to play something like that - he probably couldn't even imagine anyone *wanting* to play something like that. When you listen to it, you are mesmerised, as you are when you listen to John Coltrane; and you're not thinking 'my God, that guy can play the guitar really well!, as you are - as you are *forced* to - when listening to a prog virtuoso, because the guy who's playing the guitar simply isn't there anymore, it's just you and the music, in the moment. Whilst you sit, listening, Tom Veralin is a nobody, a nonentity; it is only afterwards, when you look back on it, that you realise that he must have been there, somewhere, all along - after all, the music couldn't make itself, could it? And that is why Tom Verlain - and the rest of Television, no point in being stingy with the praise here - are artists, and all those pointless proggers aren't, and it's one of the reasons why 'Marquee Moon' is a definite creative advance for rock, rather than a worthless blind alley.

There is, of course, more to Marquee Moon the album than just Marquee Moon the song. Within the parameters the band sets themselves - terse, clanging songs full of inventive guitar interplay - a variety of moods are visited. We have the classic opener, 'See No Evil', a bouncy, furious rocker, followed by the pop-y 'Venus'. 'Friction' is, the title track aside, the best track on here, the guitar interplay between Verlain and Lloyd at its schizoid peak. 'Elevation' is a jerky, stop start sort of song that initially feels a little lackluster in the light of the preceding title track, but soon reveals charms of its own; 'Guiding Light' is just an amazingly pretty song, with keyboards providing texture to the swooning chorus; and 'Prove It' is another fine bouncy number. The only track I'm not that fond of is the album closer, 'Torn Curtain', which to my mind seems to strive a bit too hard for melodrama, and doesn't really justify its seven-minute length. This reservation aside, Marquee Moon is an excellent album which, to my mind, almost justifies the ridiculous amount of words it has taken me to say so.     

I have a confession to make: I am a regular user - or perhaps I should say abuser - of Greatest Hits packages.

I know, I know - such compilations are evil, of interest only to people who are not *really*, deeply into music - not to the extent required of an independent web reviewer, at any rate. And yet they are so damn convenient! Take, say, The Cure: I know from reading various reviews that this is a band with a large back catalog, one that is pretty inconsistent. I haven't the time or the money to seek out all their albums, yet I am always hearing Cure songs on the radio that I like, and which originate from different stages of the band's career. I am, therefore, the proud owner of a Cure Greatest Hits package, and can spend my time gleefully switching from 'Boys Don't Cry' to 'Close To Me' to the ridiculously feel-good 'Friday I'm In Love'. And I do not feel the slightest bit ashamed.

My Cure Greatest Hits album is, therefore, a benign compilation. My Steely Dan compilation is, however, pure evil. This is because it isn't a Greatest Hits package at all, but rather a 'Best Of...' or career retrospective. These sorts of albums are increasingly becoming the norm nowadays, and they are worrying for a number of reasons. Firstly, the term 'best of' is a subjective one - who can really say what a band's 'best' songs are? - whilst 'greatest hits' is at least objective to some degree - what we choose to qualify as a 'hit' may vary depending on the type of band we are talking about, but however we do so we must only include tracks that were, by that definition, hits. Secondly, career retrospectives have the nasty habit of being compiled by the recording artists themselves, which means that they have a tendency to be a bit too inclusive. My Steely Dan compilation, for instance, is a two-CD set, and takes so may tracks from each album that the desire to actually get hold of one of said albums is drastically diminished. After all, Steely Dan albums don't have that many tracks on them to start with; if you already have five out of eight of the tracks already, as I do with 'Aja', then why bother getting hold of the album itself? Especially if you suspect - as I do - that the tracks you have are probably the best things on the album anyway.

This is a roundabout way of explaining why it took me so long to get hold of a Steely Dan album and listen to it all the way through, even though I've known and liked many of their songs for such a long time. I'm afraid that this album, with one exception, fufills my expectations, in that the songs I already knew are the best songs on the album. The songs I had already heard were: 'Ricky Don't Lose That Number' (obviously), which is 70s FM rock done at its most catchy and intelligent; 'Night By Night', which is up-tempo, aggressive white-boy funk; 'Any Major Dude Will Tell You', a well-crafted soft-rocker; 'East St. Louis Toodle-oo', a cleverly arranged Duke Ellington instrumental; and the title track, which is a sinister bluesy number. Of the tracks I hadn't heard, most are filler: high quality filler, certainly, but still just filler. With one exception: 'Barrytown' is probably my favourite song here, being an insanely catchy piano-pop confection with slightly obvious, but still pretty good, lyrics exploring the culture/counter culture divide. The other songs, however, come across as a bit underwritten. 'Parker's Band', for instance, a tribute to Charlie Parker, strains to create a feeling of excitement, but that's its problem - it's *straining* to create a feeling of excitement, when ideally it should do so effortlessly. 'Through With Buzz' is pleasant but slight: very short, at about a minute and a half in length, and the attempt to disguise its slightness by drenching it in strings just comes across as a bit desperate. 'With A Gun': again, energetic, but a pretty generic tune. Likewise 'Charlie Freak'. The album closer, meanwhile, 'Monkey In Your Soul', is nice and funky, but unfortunately doesn't have any tune at all, as far as I can tell.

All this, of course, doesn't mean that 'Pretzel Logic' is a bad album, by any means, merely an inconsistent one. Let's see, what's the tally here - 6 brilliant or very good songs, 5 tracks of filler. Not a brilliant score, but given that I'd never heard 'Barrytown' before, I certainly don't regret venturing away from the comfort of my 'Best Of...' compilation.     

This being a Livejournal rather than an actual website, I'm not quite sure how links work on here. Therefore, for the sites listed below, I'm providing their actual web-addresses as well as their names, and some personal commentary as well. Some of these are record review sites, some are just random sites that I find particularly interesting. Enjoy.

Disclaimer Music Review Archive - www.disclaimerband.com - this link will actually take you to a page where you can access both the Music Review Archive and the home page of Disclaimer the band. Run by Chris Willie Williams, who *is* the band Disclaimer, this site concentrates mostly on music produced since the '80s. Within these temporal limits, however, he covers a pretty broad range of bands. Has posted some comments to this journal previously, after I came to his attention by posting a comment on his site disagreeing over his Fountains of Wayne reviews. Full scale wars have been fought over less. As mentioned above, Will is also the band, Disclaimer, and although I haven't heard any of his music yet, it's had enthusiastic reviews among the web-reviewing fraternity, and the lyrics certainly look very good. The debut album, 'The Airbag's Lipstick Kiss', can be purchased by following the link.

Cosmicben's Record Reviews -members.aol.com./cosmicben/page/index.htm - if your favourite colour is green, then this is definitely the site for you. If not, then you'll just have to make do with the high quality reviews on offer. Maintained by a fellow called Ben Marlin, who has one of the most engaging writing styles out there in review-land - always easy to read and succinct, his reviews cover a pretty wide range of music, from classic rock to contemporary indie. Doesn't update all that frequently.

Music Junkies Anonymous - www.geocities.com/mjareviews - a large, multi-authored sight maintained by Nick Karn. This is the place to go for reviews from all over the place - all sorts of music, but also all sorts of reviewers, which can be a bit confusing at times. The reviews aren't perhaps the most elegant ever written, but they are thorough, giving the reader a clear picture as to what a particular album sounds like, song by song.

Steve and Dennis and Abe's Record Reviews - www.angelfire.com/mi4/steveandabe - a fun site run by Steve Knowlton, a guy with a lot of interesting opinions that I very rarely agree with but which are persuasively put anyway. Contains the most interesting Beatles reviews on the web, focusing solely on Ringo's drumming.

Mark's Record Reviews - www.markprindle.com - the most entertaining review site on the web, this large site covers a wide range of music in Mark Prindle's unique writing style, which could be described as meta-gonzo. Lots of purile but hilarious jokes abound, as well as some pretty sound musical judgments - Quadrophenia is given a well deserved thrashing, for instance. Highly recommended.

I would put up a link to George Starostin's Classic Rock site, but it has been put into extended (though hopefully only temporary) stasis. If and when it returns, a link will be posted. Those sites listed above are merely my favourites - by going to any of them you will find much more comprehensive links than I have attempted here.

Now for some non-reviewing related sites:

www.michaelchabon.com - the homepage of Michael Chabon, a brilliant writer, author of such books as 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh', 'Wonderboys', and 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay'. Contains essays, short pieces of fiction, travel writing etc.

www.theonion.com - America's finest news source. Go here for all your satire needs.

www.clivejames.com - the homepage of the entertaining and erudite Australian critic, poet and song lyricist Clive James. Contains essays, poems, lectures, interviews with various cultural figures of import and more.

www.livejournal.com/users/dj_ordinaire - my brother's Livejournal, which can also be accessed from my friends page. Prepare to enter a very strange world...

www.livejournal.com/users/timlewis - another entertaining Livejournal, this one belonging to a friend of my brother's. Consistently enjoyable.

I think that should do for now...    

 In his editor's introduction, Greil Marcus states: 'perhaps what this book demands of a reader is a willingness to accept that the greatest writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews'. Many people reading that sentence may well snort in derision, whilst the fans of Mailer, Bellow, Updike et al struggle to contain their wrath - but really, if you accept a pretty narrow definition of 'writer', it's quite possibly true. Being a writer is different from being, say, an 'author', and even more distinct from a 'novelist'. If we praise someone solely as a writer, we are praising them primarily for their prose style, rather than the various ancillary skills a successful writer of fiction, plays or poems must master. On this narrow ground of pure style, Lester Bangs was certainly a great American writer, and I would say that it is this fact that makes me such a fan of his work. I'm generally more attracted to American writers than British ones, because American writers seem compelled to develop individual styles of writing that somehow imply all the contradictions and turmoils of the American experience, independent of anything they actually say. British writers seem to be a lot more comfortable in the tones of voice they adopt: even if they are struggling to find answers to long-intractable problems, they seem to take assurance from the fact that the language in which they do so is to some degree already established, a given. This is far from saying that all British writers use one style of writing, merely that style is not viewed in quite the same way as it is by American writers. Therefore, for American writers, even if the work they produce is structurally a bit of a mess (I could point to the works of Dave Eggers as examples here), even if they are sometimes hampered still by a pervasive parochialism, the style will ensure that some view of the world, of life as it is lived in America at a given time, will come through loud and clear: and for someone like me, who thinks that the first thing we should ask of a writer is what philosophy they affirm, this makes American writers that much more attractive.

Hence it is that I admire Lester Bangs first and foremost as a writer, and only in the second instance as a rock critic. His style bewitches me. In this book, with pieces arranged in a roughly chronological order, his early seventies work for Creem Magazine comes near the beginning. At this time, Bangs followed the Beat line of spontaneous composition, and his work from this period has all the benefits such writing ought to have but so rarely does - a zesty, energetic gonzo style which still manages to appear elegant and effortless. Later, when he left Creem and moved to New York, finding a frequent home for his pieces at The Village Voice, he started to become a more disciplined writer, but not a duller one. Although Marcus points to a clear stylistic shift from Detroit (the home of Creem) to New York, I don't think this really amounts to much more than a slight pruning away of the more disposable elements of his gonzo jive-talk: whether in Detroit or New York, Bangs was still very much the same writer.

My preference for Bangs as a writer rather than as a rock journalist is partly due to ignorance of the artists he is talking about. I know next to nothing about sixties garage bands such as Count Five or experimental artists such as The Godz, and not very much about people like The Troggs or The Stooges. Hence, I can't really say whether I agree with his judgments or not. More than this however, I can't really point to any overall system underlying his work - just as his early work was defined by automatic inspiration in his writing, too often I think he just goes with his immediate likes and dislikes without bothering to examine them. For instance, he has quite a clear love for what he calls 'horrible noise', such as Lou Reed's 'Metal Machine Music', without ever actually explaining what it is he likes about noise: basically, it seems, noise is cool. Likewise, he likes free jazz, but is deeply distrustful of any rock music that lays claim to technical excellence - for Bangs, the more inept the band, the better.

Despite these limitations, however, I do think that Bangs had some important things to say as a rock critic, even if he was too unsystematic to turn it into a critical method. For instance, he was always insistent on the importance of the moral element in music. His contempt is reserved for those 'supergroups' that are nothing but vehicles for musicians to display their chops in a self-congratulatory environment devoid of moral context.

Obviously, with a posthumously edited book such as this (Bangs having died in 1982), the question of the editor's bias arises. Many people felt that Marcus's antipathy against heavy metal had a distorting effect on the book, but unless Bangs had something particularly interesting to say about Black Sabbath et al, I'm not all that bothered, as it's a prejudice I share (to an extent). Marcus is a fine writer himself, and his introduction provides a decent overview of Bangs' career as well as a critical appreciation of it. This book is to be recommended to anyone interested in either music, American writing, or both.     

As this is *my* Livejournal, no-one else's, I think it fair to say that not only do I make the rules, I break the rules. If I want to, that is. Which is exactly what I am doing now.

This Livejournal was set up to be a place to put reviews: hence the title, 'ReviewsPlus'. Most Livejournals, however, are quite different. Most of them, it seems, are places to put stuff about...well, whatever happens to be going on in their author's lives at that particular moment in time. A few minutes spent utilising the random search function on the Livejournal site confirms what I already suspected, that most of these are probably not worth spending too much time over - whatever interest they possess is only apparent to people who actually know the authors personally. So really, the evidence suggests, there's far too many journals doing this home-made confessional type thing at the moment, and they certainly require no new additions. Despite this, and despite the fact that this Journal will always be, first and foremost, a reviewing journal, I don't see why I can't get me a piece of this, and occasionally toss off an entry about myself, and what I happen to be up to. Reviews of real life, you might call them. If your main interest is in the reviews, then feel free to ignore these ramblings and view them simply as a form of therapy for their author - who is, to use some old-fashioned lingo, merely 'getting his rocks off'.

Last night I went to a barbecue. Luckily the weather was perfect for it, and I was attired appropriately - voluminous Hawaiian shirt, quarter-length shorts and dark glasses. Dressed thusly, and with my long hair, beard and ever-so-slight flabbiness of physice, I bore more than a passing resemblance to The Dude from 'The Big Lebowski', who is, along with Buloo the Bear from Disney's 'The Jungle Book', my main rolemodel in life. The barbecue itself was organised by the Nottingham University Rambling Society (Ramsoc for short - rambling = hiking, for anyone don't know), a society of which I have been a proud member for the past two years. However, this association is soon to come to end, for I won't, unfortunately, be a student for much longer. Well, I won't be an undergraduate for much longer - hopefully my time in the real world will be but temporary, once I've earned enough money to go do an MA. Be that as it may, however, the sad fact is that last night's barbecue was the last social of the academic year, and there were a lot of people to say goodbye to. Of course, I hope to be able to make it to some of next year's weekends away, so I doubt that there were many people present last night who I will never see again, but still - definitely one stage of my life was coming to an end. This was reinforced by the fact that all three of my housemates are either on four year courses or doing Ph.ds, so they'll still be living in the same house next year. Although I've still got my dissertation to complete - meaning that I won't graduate until December - I've only got about a month left living in Nottingham. In fact, tomorrow will be the last time all four of us - myself and my three housemates - will be living under the same roof! Aargh! What the hell is going on! Odd as it may sound, in my head I never really believed that any of this would actually happen. People leaving, moving on...no, wait, people staying still, *me* moving on. The question is: where to? At the moment I don't actually know, which is at least part of why everything seems so strange. I'm trusting that something will turn up, that my results (which I get tomorrow - another thing screwing with my head) will be ok, that my dissertation will turn out alright. None of these are particularly novel problems, certainly, but for the last three years, whatever problems I had, they were within a overall framework that made sense; I knew where I was going. Now, I've more or less reached that point, and I have to start constructing a new framework, and at the moment there aren't any indicators as to what it will eventually look like.

In spite of all this, I feel relatively optimistic about the future. Next week I will be going and spending a few days up in Lancaster, visiting a friend I haven't seen in over two years, so that should be good fun, with plenty of drink and what-have-you. Also, apparently, bowling, which I am dreading, as my hand-eye co-ordination is so bad that I quite regularly stab myself in the face with forks whilst trying to eat. But anyhoo....There will be another review posted before I leave. 

The title of this album is a slogan from a manifesto, a declaration, and quite a lot that I dislike about this album is indicated by its title. Firstly, the air of unbelievable smugness such a title exudes - this group obviously wants (or at least wanted, back in 2001, when this album was released to extravagant praise) to be perceived as the height of fashionability. Admittedly, it's possible there is a certain amount of knowingness in the superficiality of the title, but listening to the album I find that difficult to believe - this group seems to be painfully lacking in a sense of irony. This brings me to my second reason for disliking the album: the belief this group evidently holds that quiet is *enough*, on its own, to demonstrate musical quality. Kings of Convenience belong to that school of music that believes in earnestness to the exclusion of all else, including carefully composed lyrics, melodies that are memorable, and instrumental variety. The theory - or perhaps I should go as far as to say ideology - that they affirm declares that all you need do is pick a delicate, complex, and utterly unmemorable figure on an acoustic guitar, sing in a self-consciously fey and sensitive and QUIET manner about whatever personal hang-ups you happen to have (and you don't need to spend any time working on these lyrics to make them interesting, because, by some curious artistic law, stuff which would, bereft of music, be immediately recognised as sub-par sixth form poetic drivel, is automatically transformed into a thrilling insight into the artist's soul by the very fact of the music's presence), and do so in a way that doesn't even approximate anything as crude as a melody. And then fill the album up with songs that never vary from this formula.

Really, this album is a monumental chore to sit through, there is so little going on, musically or lyrically. Some albums need more listens than others to be fully appreciated, but we're not talking about Captain Beefheart or 'Kid A' or free form jazz here - the music here presented isn't complex, or subtle, or nuanced, it's just DULL. Of the actual melodies I can't remember a thing, and of the lyrics I recall merely one line - something about using a copy of The Guardian to protect yourself from the rain, which is a suitably student-y, sensitive wallflower sort of thing to sing. This line stands out, however, because it is the only memorable, non-cliched line on the whole album - all the positive reviews seemed to quote it, creating the impression that there were more gems of a similar quality present, which is of course not the case. A band that was often brought up in comparison with Kings of Convenience was Belle and Sebastian, a comparison that only makes the former group's inadequacies even more painfully evident. Belle and Sebastian do sometimes try to get by on a mere impression of sensitivity, but for the most part they know the value of a memorable (though rarely that original) melody, employ a wide range of instruments to deepen the texture of their songs, and as for Stuart Murdoch's lyrics...well, the range of voices, the witty turns of phrase, the (all important) sense of humour, are just about unmatched in indie circles at the moment.

Having said all this, this album is only really offensive if you actually think listening to music, sitting down and doing nothing else, should be a rewarding experience in and of itself. Of course, in this modern, bustling era, this is just one of the many purposes music may have. If you want something that sits pleasantly enough in the background, like some unobtrusive ornament that helps create a mood without making itself noticed, then this album would do that job quite well. In fact, the bottom line with this music is that it is make-out music, pure and simple - the group may have had ambitions for it to be something more than that, but make-out music is what it is. It creates a certain mood, an impression of intimacy, that could, I dare say, be cynically exploited in the right circumstances. In fact, I would not be surprised if that actually was the intention behind its creation. Therefore, if you are the sort of person who might find such a record useful in this way, it may well be worth purchasing this one. If you are more concerned with listening to good music than with getting laid (and if you aren't then what the hell is wrong with you?), then keep driving.

The 1980s tend to get some pretty bad press, music-wise; actually, the 80s get a bad press for just about everything, from politics to fashion to cultural values. And it is certainly true that the most typical products of that decade have not aged particularly well - excepting the author of this piece, obviously. I think, however, that in some cases it is possible to extend to 80s music the courtesy we grant to music from other decades - we accept that it can still sound 'of its time' without sounding overly dated.

This is the position I adopt with this album. It has all the hallmarks of a well-produced musical product of the 1980s. Never for a moment is it in doubt which decade it originates from. Nonetheless, in purely musical terms it transcends these temporal strictures. For one thing, the music of Prefab Sprout is not concerned with fashionability. Far from rejecting the past in favour of an ultra-modern, even futuristic, synth-vision (and of course this over-eagerness is what makes the 80s sound so naff now - people were attempting to use the synthesiser for just about everything, before synth technology had actually been perfected, meaning that, to modern listeners, 80s music often has a similar effect to watching a bad sci-fi movie from the 50s), Prefab Sprout's music has a firm sense of the past, encompassing people such as The Beach Boys, George Gershwin, Marvin Gaye - people, in other words, who you would perhaps not namecheck as a matter of course back then. Yes, there are plenty of synths and synthetic drum loops here, but we are dealing very much with the gentlest end of that spectrum. Probably the best way to describe the arrangements on this album is to say that they are tasteful; obviously a lot of time has been put in to getting them just right, but they were finished with before reaching the shores of self-indulgence and over-production.

None of this would be all that important, however, if the songs themselves weren't likewise good. Luckily, they are, for the most part. In terms of lyricism, Prefab Sprout fit my glove perfectly - they write smart, intelligent lyrics, without trying to be showy about it. In the opening track, 'Faron Young', country music is described as being 'as obsolete as warships in the Baltic' - probably one of the most inventive metaphors ever to grace a pop record. Later, in 'Appetite', we have this stunning little stanza: 'Here she is with two small problems/ And the best part of the blame/ Wishing she could call him heartache/ But it's not a boy's name'. When you catch little nuggets like this in a pop song (this album has no lyric sheet, which is just as it should be: people should figure them out themselves), your heart jumps for joy - you actually get the feeling that the person singing the words is a reasonably intelligent person, someone you could actually have an enjoyable conversation with. And how's this for an ultimate put-down: 'I've got six things on my mind/ You're no longer one of them'? For the most part, the songs deal with the familiar themes of love, loss and betrayal, though there are certainly variations. The above-mentioned 'Faron Young' is an angry, up-tempo swipe at country music (the rest of the album is pretty laid back), and the album closer, 'When The Angels', is a wonderfully joyful tribute to Marvin Gaye that goes about its business in a far from obvious way - basically, by castigating the angels for stealing Marvin because he sang even better than they did.

If there is a flaw with this album, it is that it puts its most immediate pop songs at the start of the album (with the exception of 'When The Angels'), and its more complicated, longer songs in the second half of the album. This isn't too much of a problem for me, because songs such as the multi-part 'Horsing Around' and the long, smoothly flowing 'Desire As' are amongst my favourite tracks on the album, but I think they could have sequenced things to keep the audience more on-its-toes. The clutch of opening tracks - 'Faron Young', 'Bonny', 'Appetite', 'When Love Breaks Down' and 'Goodbye Lucille #1' - are brilliant 3 minute pop wonders, but spacing them out between the longer tracks would have made the album less of a game of two halves. Also, 'Blueberry Pies' is basically a short bit of loungish filler that shouldn't detain anyone too long, though even there the lyrics are quite good.

So, overall, a near perfect record - though not quite perfect - from the 80s. The American version is, I believe, entitled 'Two Wheels Good' and has a slightly different track listing, but obviously I can't really comment on that. This British version is certainly well worth getting hold of if the opportunity presents itself.     

The title of this book is, at first glance, slightly misleading. Although it begins its story in the Prologue with the now hard-to-imagine event of Damon Albarn of Blur meeting up with Tony Blair in 1995 to discuss ways in which his band might aid the Labour Party propaganda machine, it quite quickly turns itself into a straight-forward, journalistic account of the Britpop scene, its origins and major players. It is not until quite late on in the book that Tony Blair makes another significant appearance. Once finished, however, it becomes clear that Harris has simply been subtle in developing his underlying thesis. He doesn't ram his theories down the reader's throat; he just gets on with telling his story, letting the facts speak for themselves. By the book's end, however, only a dunce will remain unaware of the story Harris has set out to tell.

This story is the story of what happens when a subculture attempts to infiltrate the mainstream, and it can be viewed as a cautionary tale of sorts. The subculture at the center of this story is the British indie music scene that grew up out of the ruins of punk, and existed throughout the eighties. During this decade, there were two broad musical camps in the country: the glittery pop world of the top-40 charts, and the guitar bands of the indie charts and the British music mags - in other words, an 'insider' and an 'outsider' divide that mirrored the larger divide that existed in the country as a whole throughout the Thatcher years. In this climate, with mainstream culture seemingly glorifying the yuppie ideology of the Government, it was something to be proud of that you were 'indie', that you were signed to an obscure independent record label, that you were extremely unlikely ever to infiltrate the top-40, let alone the top-20 or 10. Anyone who did manage these feats ran the risk of being declared a sellout. The most iconic band of the eighties, The Smiths, were commercial giants by indie music standards, but their highest chart entry was at number 10. The divide in music culture was obvious.

What eventually happened, of course, was that indie bands began to get restless about this ideology of exclusion, and started looking for a way in. One of the impulses towards this was the emergence of the acid house rave scene towards the end of the decade. This was a culture that was, on the one hand, even more antagonistic to establishment values than the indie scene, as the raves existed just on the edge of the law and were in fact soon banned. On the other hand, however, it was a cheerfully hedonistic culture, with none of the right-on left-wing pieties of indie. A meld of these two sub-cultures began to emerge in Manchester, from which the movement picked up the daft moniker 'Madchester'. Led by bands such as The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays, this movement looked, for a while, as if it was on the verge of conquering the mainstream; Ian Brown of The Stone Roses proclaimed his intention to reclaim the charts from the likes of Phil Collins and Kiley Minogue. It didn't quite work out like that, of course, the torch-bearing groups of the movement subsiding into drugs and lethargy. Nonetheless, many musicians had been inspired by the promise of Madchester to redeem the mainstream, and the search continued for a musical style that would achieve the breakthrough.

What achieved this breakthrough was Britpop, a conscious return to the traditions of British pop that had flourished in the heady days of the 1960s. As Harris shows, the impulse to rediscover this sense of Britishness came from an awakening of anti-American feeling amongst the bands left stranded in the wake of Madchester, such as Blur. Having had their fifteen-minutes in the spotlight, they were often shunted into grueling and miserable American tours, from which they received a fairly jaded view of the American scene; and, when they returned, there was some suicidal Yank in a plaid shirt playing load guitars and bemoaning the complete pointlessness of existence on Top of the Pops. Nirvana's brief global dominance was thus clearly a factor in the birth of Britpop. Suede led the way, but they were not a true Britpop band, not to begin with, at any rate. The album that really achieved the long sought after breakthrough was Blur's 'Parklife'.

Thus it came to be that actual guitar bands, the sort of bands that had, for well over a decade, been but rare phenomena in the charts, arrived at commercial dominance in the middle years of the 90s. Growing up at the time and just starting to get interested in music, it didn't strike me that there was anything all that unusual about this. The first album I bought was 'The Great Escape' by Blur, and it didn't seem at all strange to me that kids should be involved in heated debates about the relative merits of Blur v. Oasis. Of course, it would turn out that these few years were the exception, not the rule.

As I said above, Harris's story is of what happens when a subculture becomes mainstream. Did Britpop succeed in purifying the mainstream? The short answer is 'no'. Obviously, good records did come out of the movement - in Harris's view, the four best are 'Parklife', 'Definitely Maybe' by Oasis, Elastica's debut and Pulp's 'This Is Hardcore' - but the general trend seemed to be towards a cynical populism. All you had to do to make a hit record, it seemed, was to take the most cliched parts of the 60s songbook, throw them together and put a vaguely uplifting chorus on top of it all - even a band like Kula Shaker, who ought to have been seen as a bad joke from the start, were able to attain chart dominance with their ultra-retro cod psychedelia. Harris spends quite a long time narrating the story of Menswear, the first 'indie boyband', to demonstrate the depths of cynicism that were reached in these years.

In this context, the attempted hooking up with Blair becomes merely the most blatant example of the extent to which musicians compromised their integrity in their desire to become one with the mainstream. Another, grimier side of this decadence was shown by the boom in cocaine consumption this new-found success brought about, and the gradual move made by many musicians to heroine addiction. Such addiction led to the collapse of Elastica, one of the most promising bands of the period, and one of the few to have much success Stateside. The main effect of Britpop, it seems, was to make a smug, self-satisfied parochialism the defining mood of British music. Only Blur, heading resolutely away from the scene that they had done so much to create, survived artistically and, to a degree, commercially; Oasis have maintained their commercial pull by abandoning whatever originality they ever possessed and presenting an ever more bar-band-like version of their former selves. So, on the whole, not an optimistic story. It should be noted, however, that the pessimism indicated by Harris's subtitle is perhaps a bit melodramatic. Though English rock did go through a very bad patch in the late 90s, early noughties, the past few years have seen a swathe of interesting new bands such as Franz Ferdinand, The Libertines, Razorlight, The Futureheads etc., how are also achieving a fair amount of commercial success, especially now that downloads are taken into account when the charts are being compiled. None of these bands, however, make much fuss about a revival of British pop values, which is exactly as it should be.

As for the way this book is written, it is good, plain, journalistic prose that does the job of moving the story forward without making flashy flourishes, but also without tripping the reader up over clumsy sentences. One small quibble, however: the over-use of the phrase 'in excelsis'. The first time it is used, in the Prologue, where Tony Blair is described as being 'the Swinging Vicar in excelsis', it's funny: when, for about the tenth time, something is said to be 'such and such in excelsis', it gets a little bit tiresome. That quibble aside, however, this book can be thoroughly recommended to anyone who wishes to know a bit more about a very peculiar stage in the history of English music.          

You know something is wrong with the world when, announcing to your father that you are about to head into town to purchase The Band's eponymous sophomore effort (I've always wanted to write 'eponymous sophomore', and now I have, so I'm happy), he asks you, whilst you're there, to purchase also the new album by someone/thing called 'Rilo Kiley'. "Who?" you ask: is this Rilo Kiley person one of these New-Wave-Of-Easy-Listening type artists, such as Nora Jones? No, your father informs you, they are a band of which he has heard good things and also a song of theirs on the radio and whose new album (he cannot remember the title) he wishes to aquire. And thus it comes to pass that you buy The Band for yourself and Rilo Kiley's 'More Adventurous' for your father. You know you will like The Band, because you had it on loan from the university music library a while back; your Dad listens to it, and likes it. You both like the Rilo Kiley album too. Your family possess a CD copier, so the obvious thing to do is make copies of the respective albums. At least, this is what would happen if the world were FAIR and JUST. What actually happens, of course, is that The Band CD, despite being a remaster only a few years old, copies just fine, whilst Rilo Kiley's latest offering has been fitted with all the most up-to-date safeguards to protect it from this sort of copywrite infringement, so it don't. I can't really complain about record companies using technology to prevent me from making illegal copies of a product of theirs (and we all know that it is the artists, who of course would never even dream of indulging in this sort of activity themselves, who suffer, rather than record company shareholders), but the result of it is that I am stuck in Nottingham with no Rilo Kiley to my name, whilst back in Norwich my father is no doubt *as I type* listening to a copy of an album that *I* bought. Seeing as I will almost certainly be living back at home within a few months, circumstances will ensure that this is but a temporary problem, yet it still rankles. So, if any of these record company bozos are (by some bizarre coincidence) actually reading this, then I beseech you to hunt down this man, my father, and subject him to the full weight of the law (or as much of it as can be brought to bear by your no doubt colossal teams of lawyers). Only then will my rage be placated.  

If all this strikes the reader as being a bit OTT, considering that the object at the center of this predicament is, when all is said and done, just a CD, then the reader has evidently not heard Rilo Kiley's 'More Adventurous', or, if they have heard it, have not been listening properly. To complicate the matter further, I am in the perhaps not unusual position for a male listener of this album of having fallen helplessly in love with Jenny Lewis, Rilo Kiley's lead singer. This is, no doubt, an infatuation that will pass - in time, Jenny will be cast aside like so many before her. When that happens, however, there will still be the music, which to my mind is strong enough to entrance the listener no matter what their opinions on the possibly divine origins of Ms. Lewis. So it is to the music that I must now address myself.

It would seem that Rilo Kiley have been a fairly active band on the American indie scene for quite some time now, but it is only now that their profile has reached the stage where people like my father and I, over here in England, have become aware of them. I cannot therefore offer any consideration of how this album is a development or otherwise on the band's previous offerings. Seeing, however, as this album will be most people's introduction to Rilo Kiley, this is not perhaps such a bad position to be in. The actual music on this album is quite hard to describe without making it sound stultifyingly bland, which it isn't. I could throw in such terms as 'alt-country', but somehow I think that would be inappropriate, considering that I have no idea what the term means. The music here is melodic - that's probably the best I can do. It rocks, on occasions; there is the odd atmospheric blurp or bleep that speaks of high production values used with appropriate restraint; there is a lot of gentle acoustic guitar and mellow piano. The overall effect is a warm, inclusive sound, an effect which is enhanced by Jenny Lewis's vocals which, as I indicated above, have clearly had some sort of effect on me. The quality of the album's overall sound is matched in the quality of the songs. Rilo Kiley make smart music, with Lewis's lyrics dealing with the traditional subject matter of the popular song (love and relationships, mostly, although also a bit of death and, on album opener 'It's A Hit', a swipe at the Bush administration, 'Fancy[ing] himself a real decision maker/ And deploy[ing] more troops than salt in a shaker') in an original way. There are a number of stand-out tracks: the above mentioned 'It's a Hit', the power-pop gem of 'Portions For Foxes', the soulful 'I Never' (I direct the reader to study the opening of this track, as well as the chorus to 'Portions For Foxes', if they wish to understand my current infatuation with Ms. Lewis), the title track, and, in my opinion the highlight of the album, 'A Man/Me/Then Jim'. It is on this track that the band's musical proficiency and Lewis's enviable story-telling ability meld most completely. Musically the song shuffles on a lovely rolling percussion line with gentle acoustic picking and, in the third verse, some slide guitar. Lyrically the song is an ambitious act of ventriloquism. As the title suggests, each of the song's three verses is narrated by a different character. In the first verse, we have 'a man', whose best friend from high school, Jim, has recently committed suicide. At the wake he meets is 'ex-first love', and discusses love and loss with her. The second verse would fit the 'Me' part of the title, which, I'm assuming, is Lewis herself, who may or may not be the man's ex-first love from verse one. She narrates an encounter with a woman whose marriage is collapsing. Then in the third verse the narrator is Jim, the guy who has committed suicide, begging his ex-lover to take him back, only to be cast aside. The song works brilliantly as a whole, offering a profoundly moving look at those people for whom, as the song puts it, 'living is the problem'.

In a way, this review was written, I guess, as I substitute for actually listening to the album, which of course at the moment I cannot do. If my hope was that, review written, I wouldn't want to listen to this album quite so much, then it has in fact had the opposite effect. I am, as I write, seized by an overwhelming desire to sit down and listen to the whole thing through, and 'A Man/Me/Then Jim' several times over. If all this seems a bit undignified (for heaven's sake, the reader may be thinking, it's just a bloody album!) then I would like to plead, as parting words in my defense, that everybody has known a work of art - doesn't have to be an album, could be a book or a movie or whatever - that has affected them far more strongly than any rational analysis would find reasonable, which is a good argument for the power of artistic endeavour to transcend the rationalistic strictures that analysis would place upon it. For me, this album is one of those artistic products - I am proud to say that it has caused me to get carried away, perhaps more than a little unhinged, in this review. There must surely be a large number of people it will have the same effect on.          

It is possible that I am performing something of a public service with this review - though not actually all that possible, really, considering that this Livejournal of mine is hardly what you'd call easy to stumble across. Nonetheless, Pete Atkin is a songwriter who really, really ought to be more well known than he is, and at the time of writing it is still possible to purchase this, his first album, along with second album 'Driving Through Mythical America' on the same CD, from the Pete Atkin website at www.peteatkin.com , and all for the paltry sum of £10 plus postage and packaging. I wouldn't normally plug an album, or indeed website, so shamelessly, but the harsh fact of the matter is that the album is unavailable anywhere else in the world, and won't be available at all for very much longer. Between 1969 and 1975, Pete Atkin recorded 6 albums that didn't make much money. After 1975, when he failed to secure a renewal of his record contract, he had to retire from music to earn his living elsewhere. In the late 90s, a website was set up to bring together fans of his work, and from this base an active fan community managed to secure his return to music and the reissue of his original albums, two to a CD. However, the company that sells these has now gone bust, meaning that, once current stocks are exhausted, there is no prospect of these albums being available anywhere else. The CD with this album on is the only one still in stock. Since emerging from retirement, Pete Atkin has recorded two new albums, which are on a different label and thus not affected by any of this.

By now, the question will be forming in the reader's mind: 'Just who is this Pete Atkin nobody, and why should I care if I never get my hands on an album of his?' To answer the first question, erm, first....Pete Atlkin was a British singer-songwriter from the early 1970s. So far, so blah: there was a plague of singer-songwriters in those years, many of them now justly forgotten. Why should we resurrect the dead? Well, the answer to that is that Pete Atkin was not like - is not like, I should say, now he is an active recording artist again - other singer-songwriters. He is not openly confessional; he does not drown you in a flood of earnest sensitivity. And yet the lyrics to his songs are among the best ever written in rock. The reason for this is that, rather than writing the lyrics himself, Pete Atkin is part of a songwriting duo with Australian critic, poet, and wit, Clive James, James providing the words and Atkin the music. In Britain Clive James is reasonably well-known as a man who combines the dauntingly high-brow (writing learned essays in the 'Times Literary Supplement' and 'London Review of Books') with the vulgarly low (hosting TV shows in the 1990s whose main purpose, it appears, was to make fun of those crazy Japanese folk and their manic gameshows). He is what is known as a 'polymath', so it is hardly surprising that he should have dabbled in rock in his younger days. Except that it wasn't really dabbling - he saw writing lyrics as his day job, believed his career lay in rock, was a fairly active rock critic for British music mags - all the other stuff was just so he could actually earn a living. It shows in the quality of the lyrics he wrote, which stand as, to my mind, the best things he's ever done - he himself described them as 'the most intense creative endeavour I was ever caught up in', or words to that effect. It is very easy to get caught up in saying how great the lyrics are, but, to be honest, the reader can check that out for his/herself on the Pete Atkin website. It is up to the reviewer to describe how the songs work as compounds of words and music, which I shall do below.

A general point to be made about Pete Atkin's music is its melodic inventivness. Having to compose music for lyrics, rather than the other way round - lyrics that are, moreover, dauntingly erudite and wordy - there were two routes he could have gone down: he could have simply followed the intonation suggested by the lyrics themselves, producing melodies that were little more than showcases for the words; or he could have thrown away all considerations of line endings etc. and constructed a melody that was interesting in its own right. He chose the latter course, and surely it was the correct one. The advantage of dividing the songwriting duties between two people is clearly demonstrated here. Musicians are often not that bothered about the lyrics of the song, whilst poets who become songwriters themselves, such as Leonard Cohen, are often more concerned with the lyrics than with the actual melody. With Atkin and James, however, each individual is focusing his creative energies on their respective components of the song without losing sight of the overall picture. The result are lyrics that stand up on their own, unaccompanied, as poetry almost, and melodies and arrangements that are complex and far from obvious, but which within a few listens are permanently lodged in your mind.

This particular album, Atkin and James' first, is entirely acoustic, which led to their being perceived as folkies initially. However, they have very little, really, to do with folk (if anything, it was jazz that was their first love, certainly for James), and the acoustic nature of this album was the result of a twist of fate. It was recorded cheaply as a set of demos designed to interest record companies in hiring the duo as songwriters on a contractual basis - both James and Atkin were admirers of Tin Pan Alley, and their initial hope was that they could earn a living writing songs for other people. They didn't meet much interest, but then Kenny Everett, one of the nation's most outlandish DJs, got hold of the demos and started playing a different James/Atkin track each day on his show. He got sacked the same week for his outrageous behaviour, which rather put a stop to the duo's ascent to pop stardom, but had gathered enough interest to garner Pete a record deal, and the demos were released as an album. As time went on, Pete would make a habit of garnering the best session musicians he could find, much as Steely Dan did during the same period on the other side of the Atlantic, to play on the wonderfully arranged later albums. Here, the sound is a lot barer. Likewise, lyrically, James is here concerned mostly with love, rather than the scenes of death, genocide, Western civilisation on the brink of collapse, smack-heads and what have you, that would turn up with increasing frequency later. Thus the overall result is an album that is, on the whole, more accessible than later offerings, sometimes slight (as on the comic tunes 'The Original Original Honk-Tonk Night Train Blues' and the title track) but also welcoming - it creates the sensation of sitting at the back of a pub, or possibly in a converted loft apartment, with a small group of friends, engaging in intimate conversations about love and life and all that jazz. The range of musical styles offered is impressive given the instrumental restrictions; the opening track, 'Master Of The Revels', is a circus-sy tune with oompah-ing tuba, whilst the second track, 'Sunrise', greets us with gentle Spanish guitar. To my mind, this is one of those albums on which, although quality does vary to an extent, no song can truly be called a dud, and many are classics. If I gave ratings, I'd give this album the highest possible.      

The four reviews I've written so far have, I think it fair to say, been on the whole positive in their tone - I even managed to say some nice things about 'Jagged Little Pill'. And this is all well and good, and no doubt speaks wonders for the well-balanced nature of my personality, but it does mean that I haven't yet proved to myself what I can do if I really lay into an album. A destructive review is, generally speaking, much more fun to read than a positive one, and, I would suspect, more enjoyable to write. There are only so many ways we can say that we liked something, but if anything we suffer from an over-abundance of terms of deprecation. This means that, unless reviewing is your job and you have to review something you dislike, you should always be very cautious of writing destructive reviews. Such is their enjoyability for reviewer and reader alike, that if they are not tethered strongly to a, for want of a better word, 'moral' standpoint, they will degenerate into an exercise for the reviewer to display his/her writing chops. By 'moral', by the way, I'm not implying anything narrow-minded - I'm trying to say that there should be a deeper point behind the review than simply 'I really don't like this album' sort of stuff...

Which is why I approach reviewing The Who's 'Quadrophenia' with such trepidation. I'm pretty certain, however, that I have solid enough reasons for disliking this album that a reader will actually learn something useful from my review, rather than just being bombarded with invective. First off, I should state that The Who are one of my favourite bands, if not the absolute favourite. Pete Townsend, in my view, is one of the premier rock geniuses. The problem, of course, with genius - or one of the problems, at any rate - is that if it comes forward with the idea of a conceptual double-album, a 'rock opera', if you will, about the spiritual development of a young mod in mid-Sixties Britain, then there are going to be very few people around to constructively question its vision, particularly if this particular genius has already succeeded brilliantly in the genre of rock opera with a previous album, 'Tommy'. That album was, to my mind, an artistic success - I may be in a minority here, but to me the album didn't come off as pretentious at all, and though its story may well be a slightly ludicrous one, it was narrated with such grace, both lyrically and musically, that questions about its wider significance were silenced - just sit back, and enjoy this little story about a deaf, dumb and blind pinball messiah. And, even if the projected follow up to Tommy, the Lifehouse Project, never reached completion, the fragments salvaged from it still comprised one of the greatest rock albums ever recorded, 'Who's Next'. So it was perhaps not surprising that no one saw the warning signs with Quadrophenia. This was a shame, because to my mind what was produced was probably the lowest point in The Who's whole career prior to Keith Moon's death.

The sins of this album are many. The first problem I have with it is the story, the concept, that it purports to concern itself with. On Tommy, the ridiculousness of the story was apparent to all, yet the economy of story-telling Townsend employed meant that it was a rather charming and touching little fantasy. On Quadrophenia, Townsend has grabbed hold of a subject that could, with the proper treatment, have been the equal to Tommy, perhaps its superior, because it would be concerned with telling a realistic story, almost a social novella, about a realistic character. However, in terms both of the plot and of the plot's musical treatment, Townsend has been diverted down mid-Seventies cul-de-sacs of proggy fashionability. In the plot, what could have been a realistic study of character has been overlaid with a rigid organising principle - the main character has four personalities, each corresponding to a member of the band. This must have seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, but its main effect is to deny the main character any real personality at all, which makes it very hard to care much about his adventures. Nor is it clear in what way the personalities are meant to correspond to the band members - perhaps the central character is so obsessed with The Who that he has assumed their identities? As the plot has been made more grandiose and over-bearing than it needed to be, so the music has been made more bombastic - most of the songs on the album are lumbering mid-tempo rockers served with a sprinkling of synths (which on this album, unlike 'Who's Next', sound thin and more than a little cheesy).

It is not surprising that, trying to deal with these cumbersome themes, the pithy wit demonstrated by such lines as 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss', has disappeared, to be replaced with lines such as these: 'You were under the impression/ That if you were going forward/ You'd end up further onward/ But things just aren't that simple'. When Roger Daltry sings those lines in the manner of a more martially minded member of the Village People, the album has reached a low point, though not, unfortunately, THE low point, to which we will come to soon. I think that, if you set out to create a rock opera, you must be judged to have failed in a pretty major way if the story is incoherent and the lyrics unbearably pompous. If the music were any good, however, we could, I suppose, just sit back and enjoy the individual songs, though this does rather defeat the object of writing a concept album. Unfortunately, the stodginess of the writing has been matched in the musical sphere. There really is very little going on in these songs to distinguish one from another. Although most of the tracks have something good going on in them, these fragments rarely cohere into listenable songs. If the chorus is catchy, the verses will  be unmemorable, if the bridge is good, it will be surrounded by dreck. 'The Punk and the Godfather', for instance, has a slashing opening riff, but very little else about it impresses itself upon the memory. The handful of exceptions, it should be said, do stand with The Who's best numbers: the punchy, horn-driven rocker 'The Real Me', the short but catchy 'I'm One', '5:15', which sounds a little Meatloaf-y (not necessarily a bad thing, though perhaps not what you ideally want from The Who), and the closer, the lovely 'Love Reign O'er Me', though, as I indicated above, the synths are not quite to my taste. Clearly, however, this a very long way from a fully realised artistic success.

What I've tried to put across in the above review is how important actual ability at storytelling and lyric writing are if you decide to create a rock opera, because if you fail in that area I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say that you will probably fail musically as well. Pete Townsend had shown, on songs such as 'A Quick One While He's Away', 'Odorono' and 'Tattoo', and on the whole of Tommy, that he could create catchy, well-crafted songs that told absurdist stories with wit, verve and lyrical economy. On 'Who's Next', he took a more spiritual direction, but his skill at evocative lyrics remained, and his skill at writing powerful rockers reached its peak. On Quadrophenia, however, all that seems to desert him. The lowest point on the album, by the way, is Keith Moon's horrendous Cockney accent on 'Bellboy'. I've read some reviews on the web where this accent is referred to as 'hilarious'. Yes, but only in a very bad way - it's so over the top that it's practically unlistenable. Which, now I think of it, is a pretty good way of describing the album as a whole.            

First off, a little bit of info for those people unlucky enough to have never heard of this brilliant satirist. Tom Lehrer was a mathematician turned songwriter of the late '50s, early '60s, whose comic songs took in such then risque topics as oedipal longings, nuclear holocaust, venereal disease, lynchings, drug dealing, and the Boy Scouts of America, all sung in the type of voice you would expect a smart-arse Massachusetts maths lecturer to have. This CD combines two of his albums, 'Tom Lehrer Revisited' and 'An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer', and it could well be the first album I became familiar with when I was around 5 or 6 years old - other contenders for this title include U2's 'The Joshua Tree', Leonard Cohen's 'I'm Your Man', and Fleetwood Mac's greatest hits. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that I grew up with these songs, which, now I come to think of it, might well explain why I am the sort of person that I so resoundingly am today.

As I said above, this CD combines two LP albums. Tom Lehrer only produced three, as far as I am aware. The third album was released a few years after the two reviewed here, in 1964, after Tom Lehrer's first attempted 'retirement', and was titled 'That Was The Year That Was', made up as it was of songs Lehrer wrote and performed for the American version of the British satirical TV show 'That Was The Week That Was'. Those songs, in my opinion, whilst they include amongst them such undisputed Lehrer classics as 'The Vatican Rag' and 'Who's Next?', haven't, on the whole, dated that well, being as they are far more topical than the ones included here. Most of Lehrer's best songs can be found on this CD. Here they are presented in their proper medium - in front of a live audience, with spoken links between and introductions to each of the songs. I have the feeling that were these trappings absent, these songs might end up sounding a tad sterile - witty, rather than laugh-out-loud funny. As it is, songs such as 'The Elements' - which is literally just a list of all the elements in the (1959 edition) periodic table, set to the tune of 'A Modern Major General' from the 'Pirates of Penzance' - are bolstered by witty asides to the audience.

I probably ought to say here what sort of music Lehrer actually plays. Well, not rock music certainly - all the songs are performed on a piano, unaccompanied. The musical tradition that Lehrer comes from is the tradition of the well-made American song of the Broadway musical, on which subject Tom Lehrer taught a course at the University of California until quite recently. This is a field of music about which I know relatively little, but what I do know suggests that the characteristics it seems to place emphasis on - solid rhyming, technical excellence in the construction of the lyrics and melody, etc. - are antithetical to the more impulsive characteristics of rock. Whilst I'm sure that debates can be held over which form is the most emotionally resonant one, I don't think there can be much doubt that, as a setting for biting, comedic lyrics, the showtune form takes some beating. The virtuoso rhyming of the showtunes is evidently an influence on Lehrer in such songs as 'We Will All Go Together When We Go', which contains the brilliant rhyme: 'And you may have thought it tragic/ Not to mention other adjec/ -tives to think of all the weeping they will do...' Within the tight formal framework displays of dazzling wit are allowed to fly, whilst within rock I fear that the pliability of the form would work against the consistency of the jokes. Where Lehrer departs from the Broadway showtune writers is the range of his subject matter - his songs were considered part of the 'sick' humour of the early '60s, and, although they are never 'obscene', I'm certain that there would be plenty of people around today who would still be offended by the creepy 'I Hold Your Hand In Mine' ('of all the songs I have ever sung', comments Lehrer on the record, 'that is the one I've had the most requests not to'). Other highlights include a meditation on the folk song, putting forward the theory that 'the reason most folk songs are so atrotious is that they were written by THE PEOPLE', before going on to imagine 'Clementine' as it might have been written by Cole Porter, Mozart, a 'cool school' jazzman, and Gilbert and Sullivan; and a long and completely pointless monologue on the origins of the gall-bladder, followed by a song on Mexico. In short, anyone who doesn't own a copy of this CD...really should.         

The final part of my Canadian trilogy, and an introduction to a personal favourite of mine: The Band. The first thing that ought to be said about The Band is that they have the best name of any rock group, ever. Just think about the level both of humility ('oh, we're just the band, you know') and also arrogance ('hey, we're THE Band') contained in that title. The only surprise is that the name got taken so quickly, back in rock's relative infancy in the late 60s. I would have thought it would have been far more suited to the irony-heavy 90s (not that The Band's music was ever touched by even a hint of irony).

Anyway, the album under consideration here is The Band's debut album. Most people consider their second album, simply entitled 'The Band', to be the superior record (very few people, I think, would make serious claims for any other Band record being better than these two), and in this judgment I think people are, broadly speaking, right. This doesn't mean that this album is without distinctive charms of its own which its successor lacks - it simply means that the follow-up is more consistent in terms of songcraft and less dependent on outside writers (of Big Pink's 11 tracks, 3 are written by Bob Dylan and 1 is a cover of a Nashville standard, 'Long Black Veil'). What are Big Pink's distinctive charms, then? Read on, and I shall outline them for you.

Firstly, the sound on this album is very different from that on 'The Band'. There, a very deep, woody, bass-heavy sound is achieved, with guitars and other, more 'traditional' instruments taking precedent over keyboards and organs. On Big Pink, by contrast, Garth Hudson's keyboards seem to be in charge of proceedings. Sometimes, such as on 'This Wheel's on Fire', the keyboards are an annoying distraction, but in most cases they add texture to The Band's rootsy tunes. When this album was released, it was seen as being a deliberate turn away from psychedelia, but to my ears this turn away was not completed until the second album - here, the keyboards seem to place the music well within the mainstream of late-60s rock. What, for instance, would you call the demonic, over-the-top organ intro to 'Chest Fever' but a nod to psychedelia? In later live shows, this intro would expand to become a song in its own right, titled 'The Genetic Method', which in its sheer extravagance matches anything Emerson, Lake and Palmer could produce.

Secondly, this album shows The Band as far more of a collective operation than it was later to become. From 'The Band' on, guitarist Robbie Robertson was to become the group's dominant songwriter. Here, Robertson provides 4 tracks, which allows room for 3 compositions of pianist Richard Manuel's (he also co-wrote the opening track, 'Tears of Rage', with Bob Dylan). Together with the covers, this variety allows The Band to demonstrate their enviable versatility and musical professionalism. Of the 3 Dylan tracks, 'I Shall Be Released', which closes the album, is probably the definitive version of that song; as mentioned above, 'This Wheel's on Fire' suffers from gimmicky keyboards, and 'Tears of Rage', whilst not quite as good as the version that appears on 'The Basement Tapes', is still a very affecting and tender song. 'Long Black Veil' shuffles along on a nice electric piano line, but the song, which I believe was deliberately written to sound like an old folk ballad, just comes off as a bit corny and contrived. It is on the originals on this album that the group shines most. Robertson's 'The Weight' is the best known song on the album, and is my personal favourite, opening with a descending acoustic guitar line and featuring great ensemble singing in the chorus, as well as boasting lyrics that are, to put it mildly, somewhat strange. 'To Kingdom Come' is another highlight from Robertson, with the first vocal line seeming to tumble out of the singer's (in this case, unwisely, Robertson himself) mouth in a manner that immediately makes the listener sit bolt upright, or slap their knee, or something equally appropriate. Richard Manuel proves himself to be no slouch either, especially with the enthusiastic, gospel tinged 'We Can Talk'.

This album is not without its duds - as I mentioned above, 'This Wheel's on Fire' is only partially effective, 'Long Black Veil' is filler, and I'm not much of a fan of Manuel's lethargic 'Lonesome Suzie'. These provisos accepted, however, what we have here is a fine, indeed superior, debut album. The promise that it contains was to be fulfilled on its successor.