A few reviews of three of my favourite CD's... | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Stereophonics - Performance and Cocktails | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Stereophonics give good chorus. Their 300,000-selling debut Word Gets Around was full of them and this follow-up starts with two rollicking anthems, Roll Up & Shine and the Top 5 single The Bartender & The Thief. But Performance & Cocktails has the tricky task of establishing the Stereophonics as something more than a meat and potatoes Manic Street Preachers. Aside from a liking for song titles so cumbersome Iron Maiden would blanch, it's a more sedate record than its predecessor, and it's all the better for that. Those opening tracks and Half The Lies You Tell Ain't True are the only examples of hollering rock in evidence. There's a welcome degree of restraint to be found on Hurry Up & Wait, Just Looking and the jaunty Pick A Part That's New, with much use of acoustic guitars and singer Kelly Jones resisting the temptation to bellow each line as if his head were exploding. It's a good album, but not a great one. There are some fine songs here - like the two stately ballads, Is Yesterday Tomorrow Today? and A Minute Longer, plus She Takes Her Clothes Off, an acutely observed tale of an ageing stripper set to a folky shuffle. But it's at least three tracks too long (I Wouldn't Believe Your Radio, T-Shirt Suntan and Plastic California wouldn't have been missed), and Stereophonics remain a comfortable, familiar band rather than an exciting one. If the musical scope is wider than on Word Gets Around, lyrically it's far less incisive. Kelly Jones has moved on from writing about the vagaries of small town life, but his account of a night in a New York performance art club in Roll Up & Shine has none of the intimacy or detail of a Local Boy In The Photograph. At its end though, Performance & Cocktails pulls off a masterstroke with I Stopped To Fill My Car Up. A fabulous song which moves along a ghostly piano line, it sounds as odd and inspired as Bruce Springsteen fronting Pink Floyd. If this is the future of Stereophonics, the best is certainly yet to come. | |||||||||||||||||||
| Radiohead - OK Computer | ||||||||||||||||||||
| With their 1.5 million-selling 1995 album The Bends, Radiohead executed something of a perfect Yin and Yang: a great white hope and a big black cloud. Thematically, a cold look at a worn-down, scrofulous interior - Thom Yorke's lyric sheet did not so much scan as fester - it was one of the great "tension" records of recent years. It was streets ahead of the more fundamental volleys of angst to be found elsewhere in guitar rock that year and, indeed, on Radiohead's own perfunctory 1993 debut album, Pablo Honey. A new song, a gripping plea for rescue entitled Lucky - released in September, 1995 on the War Child compilation album Help - gave a tantalising indication of what their third album might contain. But now it transpires that Radiohead are even better than anybody imagined. The Bends was merely stage two in a long process of preparation for the overwhelming music of OK Computer. Radiohead are known as a dynamic and neurotic three-guitar band, but the majority of OK Computer's 12 songs (one of which is Lucky) takes place in a queer old landscape: unfamiliar and ominous, but also beautiful and unspoiled. They produced this album themselves (in their Oxfordshire studio), constructing an eerie sound-world that is both purpose-built - a five-piece rock band has rarely been better recorded - and oddly evocative of a 1984 lyric by the American group Let's Active that talked of "moonstruck eyes and grey scales". It's not always easy to determine which instrument makes which noise. The melodies are unorthodox and tangential: there are no Justs, Creeps or Nice Dreams. It's a huge, mysterious album for the head and soul. To hear one of these songs alone is to catch one's breath: it's an unknown Radiohead. To hear the whole album is to have one's milieu well and truly up-ended and one's imagination repeatedly caught off guard by Radiohead's expanded ammo-haul of treated guitars, Mellotrons (played by the increasingly dazzling Jonny Greenwood), electric pianos (ditto) and unforeseen space effects. A lot of prog rock fans will get off on the album's more planetarium-compatible noises (to say nothing of Greenwood's King Crimson-style guitar chords on the opening track, Airbag). That said, OK Computer is not a goblin zone. In his often extraordinary lyrics, Yorke glares as cynically and as disgustedly at life as he did on The Bends. But look at how he's writing now: "Regular exercise at the gym three days a week ... Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries ... Fitter, healthier and more productive/A pig in a cage on antibiotics" (Fitter, Happier). Yorke is on top form. "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way," Pink Floyd told us in 1973. Twenty-four years later, Yorke out-writes Roger Waters with heavy sarcasm (and to a better tune, incidentally): "I'll take a quiet life, a handshake of carbon monoxide and no alarms and no surprises, please" (No Surprises). Whereas Dark Side Of The Moon was about madness, meadows and muddling along, OK Computer - along with The Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness the present-day rock fan's closest equivalent to a '70s behemoth LP - evokes the sensation of the frequent flyer who has suddenly noticed he's travelling faster than his aircraft. "Sometimes I get overcharged," reflects OK Computer's The Tourist. "That's when you see sparks/They ask me where I'm going at a thousand feet per second/Hey man, slow down, slow down ..." As for the actual Earth, lyric after anguished lyric declares it an unfit place to live on, and condemns Yorke himself as not fit to walk it - so where does that leave him? The answer ultimately arrives on Subterranean Homesick Alien. Yorke, driving along a country lane at night, longs to be carried off by a spaceship. Nice planet. You can have it. Small wonder much of OK Computer sounds not-quite-of-this-world. Indeed, the first three tracks (of a five-song, continuous, 25-minute suite that's as brilliant as any music of the last decade) all mention aliens or interstellar activity in some capacity. "I'm back to save the universe," Yorke sings on Airbag, over a deeply sinister soundtrack of Mellotron, cross-purposes guitars (J. Greenwood, Yorke and Ed O'Brien), reggae-style bass (Colin Greenwood) and hissing, spitting drums (Phil Selway). If Airbag is merely fascinating, Paranoid Android is simply the song of the year. The first single, it's six-and-a-half minutes long and it comes in three sections. One of these even has its own sub-section. There's a terrific, jazzy 7/8 part with electric piano and deep-grooving bass; there's a hefty dose of blistering rock (with two guitar solos); and there's a truly awesome vocal harmony sequence reminiscent of a load of monks chanting a particularly intense extract from David Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World. Although only one song on OK Computer is what you'd call fast - Electioneering, coincidentally the worst track - it's got to be said that Subterranean Homesick Alien, Exit Music (For A Film) and Let Down are unusually slow and thoughtful. Subterranean Homesick Alien has wonderful, tingling, golden guitars and Riders On The Storm-style electric piano. Let Down begins like a delicately chiming appendix to The Joshua Tree, but then crazy synthesizers start to fly in from all directions, like a laser show. And as Let Down's guitar arpeggios drip-drip-drip into the brain, Yorke - one of very few singers whose voice can appear to convey genuine grief (as opposed to pain) and despair (as opposed to frustration) - delivers a remarkable vocal: falsetto, glorious harmonies, total and utter desolation. His voice has the terrible shiver of a toddler who can't for the life of him stop crying. Just before Let Down comes a gem of a song called Exit Music (For A Film). It concerns two young lovers leaving home and going on the run. Being a Yorke composition, it's not exactly Moonlighting by Leo Sayer. Jonny Greenwood's Mellotron produces an unearthly choir of basses and sopranos as one of the runaways implores the other, "Breathe, keep breathing, I can't do this alone." Then, during a murderous surge of drums and fuzz bass, the picture goes fuzzy. The fog clears just in time to hear Yorke moan the last, startling line: "We hope that you choke." The superb Karma Police, written about a party full of scary people, is what might have resulted musically had The Bogus Man-period Roxy Music ever tried to play Sexy Sadie by The Beatles. Even weirder is Fitter, Happier. An aural nightmare with no precedent in Radiohead's work, it's a poem of doom, centred in the workplace and recited by a pre-programmed Apple Mac that sounds like Stephen Hawking's electronic voice. The breakneck (and somehow unsatisfying) Electioneering kicks up a royal fuss, before collapsing into the uneasy trip-hop of Climbing Up The Walls. It now seems as though OK Computer's second half will comprise nothing but menace and cacophony. Suddenly, however, there's a respite from this two-song burst of chaos. In fact, the final three-song sequence has more control, more room to breathe (and arguably more beauty) than any other part of the record. Each of these three songs is the match of Street Spirit (Fade Out) on The Bends. No Surprises is Radiohead's prettiest moment to date, using dulcimer and Christmassy synth textures to decorate Ed O'Brien's exquisite guitar refrain. A lesser band would have grafted Yorke's withering lyric onto a ready-made anthem of barely adequate string-bending pique. Radiohead themselves would probably have done it on Pablo Honey. Not for the first time, and not for the last, on OK Computer they make even Yorke's most feverish couplets lift sweetly off the page. The Tourist, which follows the still-spooky-and-marvellous Lucky to conclude the album, is an unexpectedly bluesy waltz. It's not easy to play a waltz with anxiety, let alone the panic felt by Yorke's hyperventilating traveller, but they do. As it reaches its final bars, the three guitars fall out, leaving just Phil Selway's brushed cymbals, a couple of plucks of Colin Greenwood's bass and - finally - the "ding" of a tiny bell. And that is that. A landmark on every latitude. Not the least achievement of OK Computer is that a major weirdo-psychological English guitar band can induce gasps of admiration, stunned silence and more than a few lumps in the throat. It's an emotionally draining, epic experience. Now Radiohead can definitely be ranked high among the world's greatest bands. | |||||||||||||||||||
| REM - Up | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Since every new direction needs a signpost, here are a few of Up's: Sweetness Follows, How The West Was Won & Where It Got Us, Camera, Country Feedback. And here are some things not to expect along the way: Man On The Moon, Shiny Happy People, The Wake-Up Bomb. Anything that might have made it onto Monster. Much has already been made of Up's strangeness. It will certainly sound strange to those who only own Automatic For The People and repeat-play the hits. Conversely, anyone who has a healthy number of R.E.M. records - let's say four - and plays them regularly, should manage to listen to Up without his head exploding or tossing herself off a tall building or any of the weird things people are meant to do when faced with music they don't quite understand. This is R.E.M. after all. We couldn't even hear the lyrics until album fiv Up differs radically from the album that preceded it, as did Monster before it and - more successfully so - Document. There are synthesizers on it (of which much more later). There are drum machines - something it shares with Everybody Hurts (that was a Univox Rhythmer, tech fans). But what it brings into the world is exactly what Monster (Tongue excepted) and New Adventures In Hi-Fi didn't, and that's beauty. Opener Airport Man is both Up's template - a cool network of simple keyboard lines stuffed through an array of scruffy, Byzantine effects - and the most thoroughly alien track on the album, something that could have appeared on Brian Eno's Another Green World. Stipe groans the words - something about lives led unenlightened, where 'great opportunity awaits' but is ultimately 'discounted' - sotto voce, not keen to engage. Putting Airport Man first was a bit clever; as if they were saying, If you can take this, you can take anything. People who think they only like guitar records might be surprised by how they feel about Up. R.E.M.'s great knack is to make everything they play sound organic. The most synthesizer-heavy tune is Hope, basically Leonard Cohen's Suzanne (he's credited) incorporating Suicide's warm, buzzing, slightly unhinged keyboard sound. The layering is spectacular: deep squelches, snippets of a Mike Mills harmony warped and etherealised, snatches of discordant electric piano, these enter as punctuation and leave having taken the tune to another level. The fear was that R.E.M. playing keyboards would sound like old dogs trying embarrassing new tricks. The fact is they sound comfortable with the instrumentation and are pushing the capabilities of it from the off. For the most part, in fact, it's difficult to tell what's a synthesizer and what's a guitar, since Buck is flanged and phased and fedback to buggery as an, ahem, synthesis of technologies is established early on. Suspicion, for instance, overlays the wom-wom-wom of a synth-bass with a see-sawing guitar reminiscent of Nirvana's unplugged About A Boy and picks out the bones of the song's doubt-wracked seduction story with a needling xylophone, courtesy of Screaming Trees, Tuatara and now R.E.M. part-timer Barrett Martin. The texturing throughout is ripping stuff and only on The Apologist (Stipe says 'sorry' a lot on Up) - a dark folk song laced with metallic organ and distant industrial clanks - and the murkier Walk Unafraid does the instrumentation drag the songwriting into a gothy cul-de-sac. Elsewhere, the new - let's zoom in on Why Not Smile's gamelan introduction and its 'Heroes'-style treated guitar outro - lives quite happily next door to the old: the chiming acoustic guitars of Sad Professor providing the most heart-pluckingly beautiful moment of R.E.M.'s career so far. And that's saying a lot. If they've missed long-time producer Scott Litt (purged as part of the pro-Jefferson Holt faction when the manager and ex-fifth member left in 1996) you couldn't say where. And while Bill Berry's drumming had its merits, it's hard to imagine him clunking all over Up. Japan's Steve Jansen - wherever he might be - could have suited the gig, but as it is, Messrs Martin and Univox Rhythmer seem to have it covered. An R.E.M. story: when Peter Buck first brought Drive to the sessions for Automatic For The People, Bill Berry and Mike Mills were not impressed. 'It makes no sense whatsoever,' they complained. 'It just goes round and round.' A lot of R.E.M. songs go round and round, and if Up has a weakness it's a surfeit of round-and-round songs. It lacks something brash, a transfiguring chorus to drag 'em in, and quibblers might add that sticking Diminished, Parakeet (not a metaphor, it's about a parakeet) and Falls To Climb together at the end makes for an unsprightly close. On Up, only Lotus solicits the adjective anthemic, where a croaky Stipe becomes a feisty incarnation of the naughty human race ('that monkey died for my grin') and Buck tacks a tangy, aluminium guitar riff to the beginning of each verse. If it is large and memorable enough (and sufficiently 'R.E.M.') to be a second single it may be the only song here that is. Yet Up's bashfulness brings with it a peculiar grace. First single Daysleeper is the paradigm, Stipe imagining himself a besuited financier and matching the acoustic guitar echoes of Everybody's Talkin' with the exquisite sadness of 'I cried the other night/I can't even say why'. It is full of compassion and typical of Up, R.E.M.'s first record about life - rather than about the problem of being R.E.M. - since Automatic For The People. Now it can be said: R.E.M. have had their heads up their collective ringpiece for a while, and New Adventures In Hi-Fi - so tiresomely tour-frazzled ('I'd rather be anywhere, doing anything' went The Wake-Up Bomb. 'I'd sooner chew my leg off than be trapped in this' rejoined Bittersweet Me) - could practically see its own teeth. Up is full of accessible stories, and - its biggest surprise - includes Stipe's truest love song, At My Most Beautiful. The metronomic piano, tingling chimes and tuba-emulating synthesizers build a Beach Boys pastiche, while Stipe lilts 'I read bad poetry/Into your machine/I save your messages/Just to hear your voice'. Historians have a little game called 'What if�', wherein they ask - at their historian parties - if World War I would have happened if the King of Greece hadn't been bitten by his pet monkey. Here's a less controversial 'What if'. What if R.E.M. hadn't chosen to play a lot of gigs in 1995; mightn't their last two albums have been loads better? Monster wouldn't have been a transparent attempt to pen a few tunes to glue a live set together and New Adventures In Hi-Fi wouldn't have been recorded at soundchecks and might have sounded more elegant. Of course, then we wouldn't have got to see R.E.M. again and Bill Berry would still be in the band, in which case Up wouldn't sound like this. That would be a shame. Here's another. What if the five million R.E.M. buyers who passed on New Adventures In Hi-Fi are similarly untempted by Up, this long, slow, synthesizer-based, cussed old cove of a record? Maybe there'll be people tossing themselves off buildings chez Warner Bros as $80 million is consigned to the swanee, but maybe not. If the success of Radiohead's OK Computer proves anything, it's that there is a market for warped, experimental rock music as beautiful as this. Hearing New Adventures In Hi-Fi now, it has one astonishing aspect: it sounds like a traditional guitar-bass-drums group beating itself to death. After that, maybe the only way was Up. | |||||||||||||||||||
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