albums

Rip It Up, Issue 166, 1 May 1991, Page 26

albums

BEAT HAPPENING Dreamy (Sub Pop) Beat Happening on Sub Pop is only slightly less of a bizarre concept than that of the Fall on Motown (which also nearly happened). Soundgarden

they're not — they're still just a guitar, a voice and a mockery of a drumkit, and not a postmodern codpiece in sight. -

Why this formula should work so well for them when, minus the drums, it's

produced so much awful music over the years is first mysterious then

obvious. The answer is that Beat

Happening have nothing whatsoever to do with folk music fallacies about “meaningful lyrics” and “real

musicianship”, don't be fooled by the Warnocks jeans and sweatshirts look — they're all about style. Style, that is, as in the young, masochistic Iggy Pop, or Death as a Dandy on a horse, or what Kerry Buchanan must see in Elvis Presley. Its the idea of this man with a voice like the missing link between Lux Interior and Lee Hazlewood singing lines like “everything | learned/is burned” over music so primally simple it's foetal. But actually the oft cited Cramps comparison may be misleading: listening to this you just

know that when Calvin writhes around on stage the effect is tragic, not comically self-parodic. It's Beat Happening’s superabundance of instinctive grace, then, that ensures that their music’s

simplicity always suggest rawness not weakness, even when the sum of its parts is only a too-loud bass away from mid-80s Limping Nun. Everyone might think they can write and play like this but they don't because they can't. MATTHEW HYLAND

SOUNDTRACK New Jack City (Reprise)

All films at the moment seem to have soundtracks filled with swing beat and rap, like that Steven Segal fistathon, Rocky’s last round and this tale of crack and cops in designer street wear. Ice-T has a starring role but somehow | don't see him as a cop, and leads off with the fairly mundane ‘New Jack Hustler’ he's done better. Fora hard looking movie, most of the music is pretty limp, like Christopher Williams lost in a dream world, Guy singing off

key, Johnny Gill and Keith Sweat and Danny Madden doing the swing ballad. '

Best tracks for me are Troop/Levert and Queen Latifah doing a medley of ‘For The Love of Money/Living For THe City’, this one is hot.

| can see Color Me Badd's ‘Il Wanna Sex You Up’ getting popular with some, but not with me. But | like 2 Live Crew (the world’s most important band) anti-white man selling drugs and saying it's a black problem song. Sometimes you need to see the movie before listening to the soundtrack, things work better in combination. Everything sounds okay, but maybe just needs a bigger kick to it. KERRY BUCHANAN

MORRISSEY ; Kill Uncle : (H.M.V.) ! In his tradition"of lyrical cynicism and often harsh mockery, Morrissey returns

with this new platter and once more wallows in his own piety. Needless to say, this makes for another excellent record from the effeminate one,

exploring new fields of music not apparent on the earlier albums.

The undeniable slant of the record is towards jazz. ‘Asian Rut’, ‘Driving Your Girlfriend Home' and ‘The Harsh Truth of the Camera Eye’ all reek of it. Morrissey seems to have traded in his rock edge for an almost Simply Red style smoothness, allowing his dry

social comment to come to the fore. It seems he has now finally found his own niche and shrugged off his glory days. Morrissey continues to be the thorn in the side of bland popular music. Long may he continue to produce such thought provoking and socially

relevant music. LUKE CASEY

'ELEVENTH DREAM DAY Lived To Tell (Atlantic) THE HORSE FLIES Gravity Dance (MCA) Let’s start the day with a couple of unknown but definitely high fibre

alternative US breakfast cereals. Recorded in a tobacco farm in Kentucky is the sort of organic touch you might expect from some Cajun band after the smell of authenticity but not from the latest Boston guitar toters. The nearest Eleventh Dream Day come to country is the wonderfully sludgy Neil Young influenced guitar nushings of ‘lt's Not My World’ and ‘lt's All A Game’ — and that ain’t oo close.

Elsewhere these four people inhabit a sound that's reminiscent of something Australian between the Go-Betweens and the Lime Spiders. ‘| Could Be Lost’ and ‘North of Wasteland’ attack with some serious guitaring while ‘Frozen Mile’ and ‘Daedalus’ have the Forster and MacLennan facility for evoking a sense of place. The odds are that EDD haven't even heard of Australia but it's a convenient reference point for reflecting the sound of a Boston band that's worth checking out. ' The Horse Flies— how romantic — are almost as interesting. From Ithaca, but based in New York, they've described their brew as “neo-primitive bug music”. They're actually strung out between arty humour that takes shape in ‘I Need A Plastic Bag (To Keep My Brains In)’ and eclectic throwaway protest songs like ‘Road Kill’ and ‘Starvation Waltz, guitarist Jeff Claus's Byrne-like ‘Life Is A Rubber Rope’ with Rich Stearns’ Two Candles’ being the best of some eclectic love songs. Black humour, social conscience, art country and some good tunes. Not bad — no flies on these guys but you can hear where they've been. GEORGE KAY

ENUFF Z NUFF Strength . (Atlantic) These four young men seem to really know where they are going. Centred around the combined songwriting talents of Donnie Vie and the king of pretty boys, Chip Z'Nuff, this second album has all the trademarks of a

group destined for the top. It could be a case of “Watch out Poison”.

Enuff Z Nuff are capable of switching between musical styles and yet retaining a rawness that is often blunted in the mediocre groups of this field. The title track is a haunting love song. ‘Goodbye’ a classic rock ballad and ‘Holly wood ya' a low down and dirty blues. All these styles are handled effortlessly by Chip’s voice, which

glides from a metal Joe Jackson to a Squeeze-like Englishness. His talents certainly brighten the group’s chances of success.

“ Any group who has monopolised the peace symbol as their logo must be on the right track. Hopefully consecutive records will live up to this early

promise. : LUKE CASEY JONI MITCHELL Night Ride Home = (Geffen) Joni Mitchell is now in her late 40s and admits she spends more time at her easel than with a guitar. Her last four albums have arrived at three-year intervals and she has long been happily married. It all sounds like a recipe for soft-centred musical MOR.. Even the new album title evokes cosy contentment. Night Ride Home is undoubtedly one of the most relaxed albums of her career but there's

notßing remotely flabby about it

Rather, it resonates with the disciplined assurance of a major artist in harmony with her muse. Gone is the hectoring tone that marred parts of Dog Eat Dog. Mitchell is still politically concerned (as on ‘Passion Play’ and ‘Cherokee Louise’), even angry at times (The Windfall’) but the stridency has been replaced by beguiling melodies and supple rhythms. Absent too is the almost desperate experimentation of 1988's Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm. This time out she has returned to music centred on her

acoustic guitar backed by husband Larry Klein on bass and the ever-subtle percussion of Alex Acuns. When other instruments are added, such as Wayne Shorter’s soprano.sax, the colouring is kept delicate. Only once, on the :

otherwise gorgeous fitle track, is her touch questionable; the incessant rhythmic cricket chirp is more irritating than evocative. Whereas Chalk Mark found Mitchell singing opposite such mismatched vocalists as Billy Idol, here she restricts herself to one duet. David Baerwald, returning the contribution she made to his recent Bedtime Stories, adds his

hard-edged tone in fine complement to Nothing Can Be Done. Poetry purists may well object to Mitchell’s adaptation of Yeats ‘The Second Coming’ and, while the poem’s sense of gloomy apocalypse is somewhat

undermined, the track has a compensating rhythmic groove. But Night Ride Home has a sense of fun too, as in the lazy funk of the nostalgic ‘Ray’s Dad’s Cadillac’ or the lusting from afar in ‘The Only Joy In Town’. And on ‘Two Grey Rooms' the album?’s final track, she reminds us that in the area of introspective passion she has few, if any, peers.

For over two decades now Mitchell has been the standard against which other confessional singer-songwriters have been measured. If Night Ride Home is just another Joni Mitchell album that stilt ranks it ahead of nearly all the competition. PETER THOMSON

QUEEN Innuendo

Having sold over 80 million records worldwide it would be easy for Queen to make albums which required no effort (or they could even stop making them altogether). Fortunately these are not options they would consider. As Innuendo proudly proves. The great title track is sixe and a half minutes of fine musicianship which has been carefully arranged into sections and - also features Steve Howe of Yes on Flamenco guitar. ‘l'm Going Slighty Mad’ has Freddie pondering the likelyhood of him being bonkers (“] think I'm a banana tree”) and later he sings to his cat ‘Delilah’ which is silly but still fun as Brian May makes his guitar do the feline talk. The rockrs are ‘Hitman’, ‘Headlong’ and ‘Ride The Wild Wind’ and they're performed with that all round Queen sound which in many ways stole them the show at Live Aid in 1984. Lashings of layered vocals and suchlike (as in ‘The Show Must Go On’) may not be new formula for these chaps but it's those characteristics that made them a favourite band for many people. Innuendo holds no disappointments if you want to hear Queen being Queen which is certainly welcome relief from hearing dorks like Vanilla Ice doing Queen. GEOFFDUNN -

CANDYMAN Ain't No Shame In My Game (Epic) The good thing about rap when it started was that dumb thing, like the endless rhymes of mercedes/young ladies, that sort of shit.

Just like the dance records of the fifties and sixties, it kept the : “intellectuals” away, scared them silly with its stupidness, now it's depressing with all those PE T shirts full of sensitive souls — “oh, | love rap music, its so meaningful . ..so hardcore...so

interesting!!” : ' So give me Candyman who talks about knockin” boots with lots of girls and about melting in your mouth, not in your hand, stuff like that. Nothing too deep, a bit of social consciousness in ‘Don’t Leave Home Without It', a

‘hardcore’ workout on that classic

theme of pimping on ‘The Mack is Back’. It's got the usual back beats,

touch of B, slow jam with the Stylisfics, you know the sort of thing. ;

Its got a fine sense of humour with the ioies about game shows and a dig at the current Afrocentricity of hip hop, and unlike most rap stars he doesn't take himself too seriously. - We're not talking work of art, he’s no Ice Cube, (‘Kill At Will’, now thatsart) - but he’s okay.

KERRY BUCHANAN

SUSANNA HOFFS When You're A Boy (Columbia) : Female post-punk guitar band scores chart success, moves mainstream, disbands and photogenic lead singer seeks solo status. Move over Belinda Carlisle, here comes Susanna Hoffs. Ah yes, but does she have the songs to support the image? Well, um ... sort of.

There’s definitely nothing here as stellar as the numbers Prince and Kimberley Rew once contributed to the band, no individual track to transport me to pure pop heaven. On the other hand the majority of fracks are certainly serviceable in a cutesy smooth kind of way. With a tad tougher production | can imagine such sprightly performances as ‘This Time’ and ‘Only Love’ well placed on the second Bangles album. Hoffs also tries to rekindle the Bnagles’ ‘Eternal Flame’ on two tracks, however, both are damp squibs. ; Bookending the album are probably its two most obvious successes. ‘My Side of the Bed’ may be all air-brushed tease and pout but it's also insinuatingly memorable. And finally, David Bowies' 'boys Keep Swinging’ — hence the album fitle — cannily exploits the song’s sexual uncertainty. Not startling, but shrewd enough to keep me interested for next time. ' PETER THOMSON

CARTER THE UNSTOPPABLE SEX MACHINE : 30 Something (Rough Trade) Carter are South London’s alternative to the Pet Shop Boys, a wired-up, high octane dual equivalent of Billy Bragg’s social rawness and realism. Carter are guitarists James Bob and Fruitbat and various machines and samples — a conglomerate that annoyed the right people in 101 Damnations.

30 Something is their first offering on the big time of Rough Trade and it's unputdownable. Their tour of the

green and pleasant England opens with a headlong Beach Boys pastiche ‘Surfing USA', throttles even wider into the alchohol abuse epitaphs of ‘Anytime Anyplace Anywhere’ and ‘A Prince In A Pauper's Grave’, rubbishes mindless consumerism in the irresistible ‘Shoppers Paradise’ and reaches some sort of crescendo with the losers’

anthem, ‘Falling On A Bruise’ which conciudes with Michael Caine reciting his Alfie fatalism: “It seems to me if they aint’ got you one way they get you

another”. , Carter offer no answers but like Bragg and the Gang of Four they're naive enough to tell it like it is with the sort of verve that's usually reserved for sex machines. o GEORGE KAY

MANTRONIX The Incredible Sound Mdachine (Capitol)

The new look Mantronix are back and they’ve definitely improved from last year’s effort. Curtis Mantronik has always had a very deft touch on those mixer knobs and hé seems to be :

settling into a style he’s comfortable with on The Incredible Sound Machine. The beats are sharp and funky and Bryce Luvah along with Jade Trini do the vocals with enough power to make the whole deal worthwhile. Mantronix are at their best when they aim for a modern soul sound on tracks like ‘Step To Me’ or ‘Put A Little Love On Hold’, throwing a little passion in with the -

drumbeats. Mantronik still draws on his Electro heritage too, there’s still plenty of moments like ‘Make It Funky’ where he gets a little loose. ‘The Incredible

Sound Machine’ is certainly not anything special, but its listenable enough mainstream dance music. I'd still like to see the boy forget about being sauve and just get down, dirty and back to basic again. KIRK GEE :

KEITH WASHINGTON Make Time For Love (Quest/Warner Bros) tape/CD Mr Washington is a serious love dude, here’s a sample, “All night, all night baby, we can wine and dine, make sweet love and take our time, all night, all night baby”. Yep, there’s no messing about with big Keith. There is a danger of the big love hangover, like after ten tracks of ; romantic intensity you start to look for a little violence, maybe watch Blind Date or something. - But then again fans of the genre will get real excited over this, because this professional vocal coach turns on a classy set. Very much in the Anita Baker mode, gentle grooves of a acoustic nature, based around piano and saxophone. Produced and arranged mostly by Barry J. Eastmond, best known for his work with Freddie Jackson. - A moody set for those with romance in their genes. : KERRY BUCHANAN

EPMD : Business As Usual : (Def Jam) : Kicking in to the third album, Erik and Parrish create what at first seems to be a brick wall of noise. Impenetrable and dense, you just slam into it. The first four tracks define the new hardcore style, it's still that EPMD groove, but with an added edge. A lot of this album sounds like a Mack truck out of control, some of the tracks have names like ;

‘Manslaughter’, ‘l'm Mad’, ‘Hit Squad Heist’ and ‘Rampage’ which suggest what they sound like. But the more you listen to it, the less you feel like you've been hit by a baseball bat, the groove and the rhyme becomes clearer. - ‘ First, theres the continuing saga of ‘Mr Bozack', the ultimate homage to a rappers’ dick, a theme that will never go away, as long as there exists R&B.

You have to remember that these are not exactly new age men, they have a tradition to work on. Like the reappearance of ‘Jane’, this time told through a tale of sexual mis-adventure and confused gender. If's a funky joke designed to make liberals shudder. So too is the first single ‘Golddigger’, a mass of scratch over a solid rap about a predatory female looking out for the dollars Erik and Parrish have made.

| like it when things get funky, like in a James Brown groove on ‘For My People’, the use of Eddie Kendrick's ‘Keep On Truckin’ on ‘Underground’ and the O'Jays on ‘Give The People’. They save the best for last with ‘Funky Piano’, one of these sample heavy things with the DJ going from beat to beat, there's Sugarhill galore and a nifty loop that rings like a bell in your head. KERRY BUCHANAN

COWBOY JUNKIES Whites Off Earth Now (BMG) Made back in 1988, Whites Off Earth Now was the Cowboy Junkies’ debut offering recorded virtually live with no apparent overdubs, its a recognisable precursor to the celebrated Trinity Sessions. This album has the same haunted confessional air of its successor, the same intimate portraits of pain and redemption. Margot Timmins achingly pure vocals are again the focal point mixed up

close to the Junkies’ suitably spare backdrops. ; The maojor surprise comes in the Junkies eschewing the country influences in favour of that other great American musical cornerstone, da blues.

In fact, there’s only one original on show here, ‘Take Me’, which is pretty typical Junkies fare and really could

have appeared on later albums and not been out of place. Apart from their version of Springsteen’s ‘State Trooper’ which with its pared down sense of despair is an obvious choice of cover, it’s all prime time blues. Such seminal, genre maestros as John Lee Hooker, Lightning Hopkins and Robert Johnson have their songs sucked into the Junkies milieu. Blues

landmarks like ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ and ‘Crossroads’ are remade and remodelled and it's all totally convincing. Whatever their source of inspiration, it's still unmistakably the Cowboy Junkies, after all, nobody else sounds quite like them. : :

GARTH SEEAR