Permanent Waves #18
Break the scream with a silent voice, everything is alright!
Welcome, or welcome back, to Permanent Waves, a weekly-ish expedition into the power pop (and beyond!) of the year 1980.
Got a nice thicc docket for y’all this week: nine albums running a wide gamut from metal to folk to jazz-funk to postpunk! There’s a little something for everyone, but only the cream of the panderin’ crop shall be blessed by the ZAMN— let’s mindset!
Alice Cooper - Flush the Fashion
To me, the fundamental fact of Vincent D. Furnier is that he’s ambitious beyond his means. That can be easy to miss, because his instincts for carnal provocation are so sharp– as the man himself puts it, he’s “into fun, sex, death, and money”– but ever since he broke up his old band and jacked their name for himself, he’s also been striving to refashion himself as a sort of hard-rock Andrew Lloyd Webber. Even if the results are consistently interesting, I’d be hard-pressed to call much of it truly great (though sobriety and Bernie Taupin both seemingly did a lot of good for 1978’s From the Inside). Anyway, now he’s on the blow and trying his hand at new wave, I guess… So much for flushing the fashion! The migraine haver in my life got a kick out of “Aspirin Damage” at least, but the carnal provocations are in short enough supply to make this basically worthless to any dyed-in-the-wool fan. His heart just doesn’t seem to be in aping Devo and The Cars; maybe he should have written another rock opera around that song about clones instead.
VERDICT: SKIP
Australian Crawl - The Boys Light Up
This Vic pub band loves their sarcastic lyrics about the idle rich, which I’m always game for, but their tongues are too firmly in cheek to give ‘em the lashing they really deserve; maybe the fact that the idle rich are their primary audience has something to do with it. They’re still young, and easy on the ears besides, so I’m optimistic that playing for a few crowds of proper blue-collars will get it through their skulls that this shit ain’t cute. At the very least, I hope it’ll teach them that a little guitar fuzz never hurt anyone. Best track: “Downhearted”, the tougher, boozier take on Steely Dan you never knew you needed.
VERDICT: FINE
Brats - 1980
If Shakin’ Street embodies the righteous, innocent ego of rawk and roll in the AC/DC mold, This Danish quartet embodies rawk’s hyperactive, impudent id— They play heavy metal like it’s punk, which is to say sloppily, simply, and often (but not often enough) breathlessly fast. Without checking, I’m guessing they’re rather serious and talented students of the Ramones, and rather distracted and juvenile, though no less earnest, students of Judas Priest (and their moms still won’t let them listen to Motorhead). That combination very much has its charms, the problem is just that the charms fly by, while everything else plods. Gimme a whole A-side of crackerjack hooky headbangers like “Punk Fashion”, “Fuel”, and “Accepted”, and I’ll be so thrilled they can throw a few slow ones on side B and I’ll even convince myself to like ‘em. Mindset of the week: You believe in fashion / Yeah, that is your passion / Punk in mass production / Fashion is destruction / Regiment the masses / They’re wearing punk sunglasses
VERDICT: NICE
The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms
These New Jersey suburbanites kick off their careers as recording artists already steeped to the tits in mindset, signed with Stiff Records after The Village Voice called them “The best underground band in New York”. Indeed, Crazy Rhythms is exactly the kind of music that would rule the airwaves if people who write for The Village Voice or know what Stiff Records is had their way about it. As things stand, they’re too good for the radio. Hell, they’re too good for the underground, too. They cite the Beatles and the Velvets both as influences, and sure, it comes across, but that’s every other band on the planet these days. The more fruitful comparisons are with The Modern Lovers, or Television— same askew angst, same jittery way with hooks, same trenchantly cool uncoolness. They play tighter than either, too, which counts for a lot in my book. The album title says it all, really. Just take a listen to “Forces at Work”, the fucker rocks such a commandingly precise groove that its seven minutes flies by in what feels like three. Their “Me and My Monkey” cover? Downright funky, yet somehow uncannily, engrossingly machinelike at the same time. All the hats off to drummer Tony Fier (fire? fear?) for locking the hell in, hats off to the other three for keeping pace with him.
VERDICT: ZAMN
Grateful Dead - Go to Heaven
I’ve always preferred the Allman Brothers for meandering hippie white-blues jams, and the Dead are such a live band anyway that they’ve outright admitted that this is little more than a contractual obligation, so, y’know, what does it even matter that I don’t really like it, right? Well, for one, there’s “Feel Like A Stranger”, a lugubrious dance track that confirms every bad vibe coming off that eyesore of an album cover. Maybe they’re just too established and too successful to make convincing counterculture at this point, but it’s a lot more depressing that they aren’t even trying. “Easy to Love You” sounds like the fucking Eagles. You don’t need to be a deadhead to know that nobody was asking for this, but you might need to be on a helluva lot of acid to not realize how generic their mellow rootsy vibes have gotten.
VERDICT: SKIP
Emmylou Harris - Roses in the Snow
Not bad, just a little bit dull. Emmylou’s voice is almost as featureless as it is limber, and an album with as much of a bluegrass twang to it as Ross in the Snow calls for a little more down-home grit than she can quite muster. She has the good sense to frontload it with two bangers, rendering the title track adorably and timelessly, and “Wayfaring Stranger” hauntingly and genrelessly. Most of the rest is a few shades too easy-listening for my taste, and the star-studded guest list comes and goes without much ado (Hey, Johnny Cash on “Jordan”, though!). Hot take for the week: “The Boxer” was never all that great of a lyric, and all Emmylou can do for it is come by kitsch a notch more honestly than Paul Simon.
VERDICT: FINE
George Duke - A Brazilian Love Affair
On his fourteenth(!) studio album, this decorated fusion keyboardist sounds like he’s cashing checks from the biggest names in the biz, which he is. As far as I’m concerned, the star attractions here are the evocatively-titled samba frenzy “Up From the Sea It Arose and Ate Rio in One Swift Bite”, and the poppin’ bassline on the opening title track. A lot of it is kind of too slick and expensive-sounding for me to feel too strongly about it, and that Brazilian influence is too often reined-in on merely competent sex-jam smooth jazz like “I Need You Now” or “Love Reborn”. It’s pretty and fun, though! Saved from FINE tier by Roland Bautista’s molten-hot guitar leads.
VERDICT: NICE
Laraaji - Ambient 3: Day of Radiance
Brian Eno only produced this one, but his work has already sort of dispensed with the primacy of performance in recorded music, hasn’t it? Maybe so, maybe so. What it hasn’t dispensed with by a long shot is the primacy of collaboration, and one of his finest collaborators yet is a man named Edward “Laraaji” Gordon, who plays a harp/lute thing called a zither that Wikipedia indicates is popular around the Alps. Together, they have created a miraculous 20-minute wonderland of cascading, interlocking melodies and rhythms called “The Dance” and 26 minutes of perfectly pleasant and relaxing Eno-by-numbers pink air called “Meditation”. Write off side B as new age yoga studio filler if you must, but side A makes the blissed-out choral reveries of The Plateaux of Mirror sound downright stuffy by comparison. Not as mathematically perfect as Music for 18 Musicians, spirited enough to compensate for it.
VERDICT: ZAMN
Magazine - The Correct Use of Soap
On album closer “A Song From Under the Floorboards”, Howard Devoto sings of his insectile pride, and to be sure, there has always been a certain insectile quality to Magazine, from Dave Formula’s wheedling synths to John McGeoch’s scuttling guitar (now more melodious than ever). On their terrific 1978 debut Real Life, though, they were also kinda creepy, dispassionate even in their fitful paranoia, intellectuals with no real wisdom. Since then, Devoto has sounded more and more like a bug that thinks he’s a human— eugh. McGeoch is developing into a fierce utility player, though: “Because You’re Frightened” is a keeper because he knows just how to make everyone else get out of the way of his playing, and “Philadelphia” is a keeper because he knows just how to get out of everyone else’s way. But he can’t save the ill-conceived Family Stone cover, nor stop Devoto from ruining “You Never Knew Me” with sour grapes masquerading as piercing insights. Christgau called them pretentious and, well, I don’t not hear it.
VERDICT: FINE