albums

Rip It Up, Issue 173, 1 December 1991, Page 28

albums

VARIOUS ARTISTS Deep ; Grooves (Deep Groove) - VARIOUS ARTISTS : The Rhythm Volume 3 (WEA) Two compilation albums of a funky nature, both with ties to Auckland radio stations. BFM personalities Kane Massey and Mark Tierney have have combined with the Lab Studio’s Bill Latimer to form new local record label Deep Groove. The label self-titied debut features a range of artists already well known, and some new talent. Almost everyone has been produced by Tierney, the master of raw ambient grooves. Standout tracks are Jules Issa ‘Dangerous Game’, Riot Riddum Sound System ‘Home Girl’ (although trying too hard to be lyrically correct), Love and Bass ‘Deep of the Night, and the Straw People Tough Culture’. The latter two tracks notable in that we get both straw persons rapping. An excellent start for the label. ! 5 On the more commercial front and featuring no local artists we get RV3. Miles has been loitering up at 91FM to find out which tracks are (or are going to be) the mega dance hits. The Rhythm series has eclipsed the Yo! series because every song is guaranteed to rock the party (which is why people buy these things). Even Stamp readers can buy RV3, five of the tracks were / are on BFM playlist. Standout track has to be Oaktown's 3.5.7. Turn It Up'. RV3is an excellent compilation for people who like compilations, marred only by the inclusion of Color Me Badd (who really do deserve to be shot on sight). NICK D’ANGELO - COLD CHISEL Chisel (East/West) - JIMMY BARNES Soul Deep (Mushroom) Sometime back, maybe 1980, in a place long since gone, Jimbo and Chisel assaulted my drunken ears. ‘Cheap wine and a three day growth . . .. Jimbo swigging vodka from the bottle, playing up to a crowd of : suburban kids, ready and crazy for a good time. Time passes, | forget about Chisel, wrong move. As | listen, in retrospect, | still hear the initial blaze of excitement that got people so intense. Like the anti-authoritarian ‘Star Hotel’, an anthem of rock n'roll rebellion and working class solidarity. ‘Misfits’, written for a doco on homeless kids, but easily translated into any lifestyle. Personal favourites would be ‘Rising Sun’, with its rockabilly pull, the radio friendly ‘My Baby’ and ‘Forever Now’, and the intense reading of' Goodbye - (Astrid Goodbye)'. - | Perhaps the quintessential Australian band, combining the elements of

rock'n’roll, boogie, blues, soul and eventual MOR into a killer format. Intelligent song writing from Don Walker and Jimbo's scream combine to defy any.preconceptions about mainstream rock. The fine liner notes from John O’'Donnel will enlighten. Now, Jimbo has had a fine solo career. The epic ‘Working Class Man’ and the top selling “Two Fires’, what else is there to do2 Of course, do the covers album, the soul one, be at one with Otis, Sam, Joe, Diang, lke, Stevie and all them black folk. Hell, so would I! Jimbo takes a path well trodden, the ‘soul’ album seems to flow naturally from years of solo albums and | for one don’t mind it a bit. He covers most bases, the duet scene with Diesel (used to be Johnny, but now only one name, sorta like soap powder), and Mr Farnham, the soul screamer on Wilson Picketts ‘| Found A Love’, the down home funky chicken of Joe Tex ‘I Gotcha’ and ‘Show Me’ and then the odd jobs like the Supremes’ ‘Reflections’ and Ms Ross's ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ and a cool wonder in ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours)'. All marvellous songs, brimming with enthusiasm and a sense of joy that you just have to like. Maybe not ‘classic’ interpretations but, hell, who wants that! You want the originals, you go to them, these versions are fun and show -Jimbo's growling voice off well. 2 Middle of the road, perhaps, but | for one don't mind standing there in the glow of these songs, performed by an Australian institution of such great stature. : Both excellent recordings, designed to delight. ; KERRY BUCHANAN KID 'N PLAY Face The Nation ; HEN-GEE & EVILE Brothers I've always had a soft spot for Kid ‘N Play, especially after seeing them in House Party (available on video, House Party 2 in theatres next year). They're nice guys with deft beats, good lyrics, and no dress sense. Kid ‘N Play

are black, proud, and a little tired of ‘Rap Gangsta’ types. They're from the suburbs and don't stand for no cussin’. A fairly innocuous album with the title track and ‘Next Question’ standing out. Hen-Gee & Evil E on the other hand have no compunction (look up these big words!) about using profanity, although they seem remarkably restrained considering the years they've spent with Ice T. Better known as his partners onstage Hen-Gee & Evil E go it alone with Carlos Alomar producing. (Wasn't he David Bowie’s guitarist?). My original enthusiasm for this album has waned, some of the beats and samples don't stand up. The lyrics are pathetic and / or offensive, which is why | prefer the Spanish raps. I'm sticking with Ice T. NICK D’ANGELO MY BLOODY VALENTINE Loveless (Creation) A few years ago Charles Bernstein wrote a book called The Poetics of the Nude Formalism. It was a great oversight on My Bloody Valentine’s part not to take this for the fitle of their second album, not just in order to revive the dying art of literary name dropping but because it describes their genius so exactly. The “formalism” bit is obvious: the pleasure of listening comes entirely from the way the sounds work in your head; it would be absurd to look for the specificity implied by “content” in .either the barely bearable lyrics or the musical structures. “Poetics” is applicable in the popular, not the academic sense: the songs on Loveless are “poetic” in that they evoke states of the highest Romantic resonance: dreams, through the strangeness of the dynamics — instruments that don't sound like themselves, frequencies that other bands just don't reach; delirious sexual desire — the songs are arranged less in terms of chord progressions than successive swoons; and dissolution of the self (in love, in noise) — what you and | call death. ‘Nude’ is appropriate to the melting vulnerability of the male and female

voices and fo the way the music interacts so directly with the listener’s body, unexpected shifts of sound causing strange, involuntary physical sensations. Listening to this it's easy to forget that in the last two years most of the band’s many admirers have picked up guitars and been given record deals of their own. Some of these disciples are actually very good, but My Bloody Valentine tower over them all because instead of using noise as an accessory with pleasant undemanding pop songs they allow mutations to pervade the very heart of the music. Whereas nearly everyone else puts down a solid rhythm track, they’re as like as not to use an unstable, fading echo of a guitar or a sample with an undigestible rhythmic twitch. It may be that in a world obsessed with heartwarming “90s" consensus, with “sensible” compromises between dance and rock, sound and song, no-one else can be trusted to stay so uncompromisingly disorientated. MATTHEW HYLAND THE DRIBBLING DARTS OF LOVE : (Flying Nun) Being the collected recordings of Messrs Bannister and Gregg and Madam Bulmer, taken with due regard from their existing phonographic works Shoot and Florid Dabblers Voting and consisting of nine separate works in the popular intellectual skiffle genre. "* Or something. It often seemed Matthew Bannister’s musical ambitions sat uneasily in the straight-up rock band format of Sneaky Feelings (actually, you could probably say that for everyone in the band), but here his musical personality is right at home, if only because the Dribbling Darts of Love are pretty much built around that personality. These three are musical pipe-smokers, quirky, quaint and dry as

snuff — couplets don’t come any drier than “My heart is bleeding/ I'm in Dunedin”. But it works because they never let the filigree get away on them’ — Bulmer’s violin, for instance, always sounds integral rather than a gimmick, and the clever little backing vocals on the second record virtually define the ‘phrase “just so”. The spirit of the whole thing has even extended of late to Bannisters own radio ads for the Darts gigs: “Avoid them! These guys are wimps!” he spat in mock derision. Yep, hard, fast and heavy they ain't — but they give brainy wets a good name. RUSSELL BROWN GENERATION X Perfect Hits (Chrysalis) BUZZCOCKS Operators Manual / Best Of (EMI) On the heels of the Jam's Greatest Hits comes another couple of punkish refrospectives. . | remember reviewing Generation Xs first album in these very pages about three musical generations ago and comparing them to the Kinks. God, how wrong can a poor boy be. This Perfect Hits, if you can pole-vault the unintentional irony of the title, proves that they weren’t much more than peroxide opportunists with a cutish, . chunky punk sound and the odd knack of conjuring terrace anthems like ‘One Hundred Punks’. ‘Ready Steady Go’ and Your Generation’ are forgivable for their innocent name-dropping of a previous decade but less excusable was their later fare like ‘Dancing With Myself’ which was a portent of the sound that was to become Billy Idol. Dated and effortlessly disposable. By comparison, the Buzzcocks are granite durable. The twenty-five songs here compile a much more complete picture of their explosiveness and development than Singles Going

Shelly was a neurotic and gifted writer who mastered the art of the pop single without sacrificing the band's kinetic edge or his own personal standards. Unlike Idol, his wasn’t a star trip, it was exorcism. So after the initial disappointment that there’s no Spiral Scratch inclusions, Operators Manual thoroughly charts why this band steered into legend. From the opening release of ‘Orgasm Addict’ and ‘What Do | Get’ (sorry, theres no ‘Oh Shit) to the big concussions of ‘Fiction Romance’, the ambivalent perfection of ‘Ever Fallen In Love’, the focussed anger of ‘Promises’ and ‘Lipstick’ to Shelley’s confessional ‘I Believe’, this is the quick and essential guide to why dad can't stop talking about the Buzzcocks. You punks queue here. : GEORGE KAY MARC ALMOND 2 Tenement Symphony (WEA) In which Marc, the Immaculate Consumptive you can bring to tea with Granny, (re)discovers electro-dance and continues to parody himself with a cruelty most of us reserve for people who write to music magazines questioning reviewers’ omniscience. If you like the basic concept — the hi-tech cartoon of ‘3os Berlin decadence he’s been selling for the last ten years — it works perfectly. There’s a Jacques Brel cover, a Debussy extract, a suicide anthem and a song called ‘The Days of Pearly Spencer’ and its produced by the two people in the world best qualified to make electronics sound tragi-comically windswept: Trevor Horn and Almond's Soft Cell partner Dave Ball, now with the Grid. At best it sounds almost as over-ripe as the ‘Associates’ stab (all senses of the word) at pop stardom, ‘Perhaps’. Either avoid completely or wallow.

MATTHEW HYLAND

THE MEAT PUPPETS Forbidden Places (London) - Poor old Greg Ginn, all SST' better acts have been flying the coop to maijor labels at an astonishing rate lately. He probably should have worried more about developing things for these guys than releasing free-jazz wannabees like Zoogz Rift, as all these defectors (Dino Jnr, Firehose, Screaming Trees efc) have wandered off and made great albums. Latest in this list are the Meat Puppets who have come out with the album they've always threatened us with. Forbidden Places is the near perfect mix of their early excursions into noise with the later melodic stuff and a healthy dose of country hovering in there too. Maybe using Pete Anderson (Dwight Yoakum’s producer) has nudged them along the paths of precision and melody, but the Kirkwood bros have always been ‘hovering on the edges of pop with bite and now they've gone the whole way. Turn this up loud on a hot day and imagine you're lounging in Arizong, it all seems quite sensible then.KIRK GEE OZZY OSBOURNE , No More Tears (Epic) Ozzy has obviously put a lot of time and work into this one with the quality of singing and songwriting being among the greatest he's done. The heavy emphasis on melody and structuring is reminiscent of the landmark Blizzard of Oz and Diary of

a Madman albums which he made with Randy Rhodes. A magical music box and kiddies at play make way for the menacing ‘Mr Tinkertrain’ as Ozzy in unmistakeable voice begins the story of his life on the “crazy train”. ‘l Don’t Want To Change The World' is a bit of humour as its a statement directed at critics and religious fanatics who forever hassle the Oz because they think he’s a full time bat-biting devil worshipper when really he’s just a rock n'roll rebel (yeah, even at 43 years old). There's talk that this is his last record and tour and who knows, maybe it will be but asthe Hellraiser says himself, “I keep saying

it's getting too much but | know I'm a liar”. There's three ballads to be found on No More Tears and as with most of the album, Ozzy really puts his heart and soul into ‘em, especially in ‘Mamma I'm Coming Home'. For the best real heavy tracks check out the wicked rhythms of ‘Zombie Stomp’ or. the mean ‘Desire’ riff which breaks into Zakkattack after the uttering of a hearty ‘Hi Ho Silver’. Young Zakk

‘Wyldes' playing has improved in the four years that he’s been with Ozzy and varies from electric to acoustic and steel guitar as in ‘AVH'. The showpiece build-up of the ‘No More Tears' track is very well arranged and

has a keyboard section which sounds a bit like the Beatles (Ozzy’s favourite group). In the past some of Osbourne’s recordings have slightly suffered due to wrong production or musicians but this time Ozzy's got everything right. GEOFF DUNN LEE HARVEY Security 198 (Flying Nun) Regardless of how Lee Harvey personally felt about being promoted as “the new Chris Knox”, his debut EP settles the issue pretty firmly. He ain't — largely by virtue of what sounds like a crippling attack of reficence in the

‘Laughing Money Man’ is, as an opening shot, something less than an attention-grabber, ‘Crawfish For Elvis’ doesn’t exactly rock and ‘See Sore’ just sort of glides by. - Only on ‘Capo’, with a couple of Picassos moonlighting as the Bagmen, does it sound like the work's gone in — the ringing opening lines set the tone for a graceful, atmospheric little tune. But things fade back to grey for ‘Girl In Yellow’ and the fitle track is asilly piece of flotsam without the weirdness or the angle which redeem silly pieces of flotsam in these situations. My partner says it sounds like he needs a boot up the bum — and she’s probably right. RUSSELL BROWN VARIOUS ARTISTS 20th Anniversary Collection (Alligator Records) This is the sort of Cinderella story - that everybody loves, except this one takes twenty years. In 1971 Chicago Blues from Bruce Iglaver used a $2,500 inheritance to set up Alligator to record his favourite Chicago band, Hound Dog Taylor and the Houserockers. Twenty years later with a staff of fifteen and gross annual sales of over $3 million a year, Alligator is the leading blues label in America. Appropriately this 35 song double CD opens with ‘Give Me Back My Wig' by Hound Dog, a gritty rollicking track from his album that took S9OO and a two-track to record. So Iglaver, who also produced his labels acts, personified the do-it-yourself spirit and

up until the mid-1980s he ran the

company from his house. By then he'd attracted or discovered quite a roster of talent including ex-Chess waiter Koko Taylor, the legendary Prof. Longhair, Albert Collins and a lesser known genius from Arkansas, Son Seals, whose slow blues intensity and great soulful vocals make his ‘Going Back Home' the pick of a very fine crop indeed. Also in the mid 1980 s Iglaver signed up Johnny Winter, at that time perceived as mainly a rock nroll guitarist but the man’s blues worthiness was effortlessly displayed on a brace of albums for Alligator with the track ‘Boot Hill' making this compilation. This signing ushered in a number of guitar-heroes including Roy Buchanan whose heavier style is heard on‘Drowning By Numbers’ and Lonnie Mack whose playing on ‘Strike Like Lightening’ speaks for itself. " Now with 25 Grammy nominations under his belt, Iglaver may have reached the American dream but his commitment to the blues means future stars like the heavily touted guitar hero Tinsley Ellis, the urban raunch of the Paladins and the more traditional flurry of Li'Ed and the Blues Imperials are at least as important as his past achievers. Happy anniversary Alligator records, and happy Christmas to - anyone with the suss to buy this wonderful compilation when Santa comes to town.

GEORGE KAY