Permanent Waves #19

There's a pile of opinions in my brain!

Welcome, or welcome back, to Permanent Waves, a weekly-ish expedition into the power pop (and beyond!) of the year 1980.

Docket’s on the lighter side this week: six albums, and on balance maybe one of the more consistently solid batches so far (not to mention the most consistent palette album art-wise, four out of six are mostly black and white). Spoiler alert, no big ZAMNs, but plenty of quality jams nonetheless— Let’s mindset!

D.B. Cooper - Buy American

REALLY good angry-young-man power pop right ‘ere, not by the notorious plane hijacker, but rather a band of five Cali dudes who clearly did not have the foresight to name themselves something with better SEO. This is more or less a perfect illustration of the things I found so lacking in D.L. Byron’s This Day and Age back in January. The lyrics are sharp, the touches of Springsteen-y schmaltz are understated enough to compliment an overall tone of alienated cynicism, and the guitar leads all snarl like the dickens— no namby-pamby girl group jangle here, dudes! Right off the bat, opener “Had Enough” hooked me right the hell in with its broadsides against “pussy little bar bands” and “burned-out hippies sellin’ their middle class plans”, and even though the rest of the album doesn’t quite match it for sheer piss and vinegar, there’s still plenty of rockin’ good times to be had with classic jukebox tuneage such as “Chasin’ Rainbows in the Night”, “Forever Rock ‘n’ Roll”, and “Ram On” (not a Paul McCartney cover, thank goodness). Sorely tempted to give it a ZAMN, but I sense too much unfulfilled potential. Next time around, if frontman Michael Towers comes off like an even bigger asshole, they’ll have it on lock.

VERDICT: NICE

Cold Chisel - East

I wish I could give more props to these Adelaide stadium-rockers, because their fundamentals seem pretty darn solid. To be more specific, something that often itches me about bands in this mold is how slick and factory-made they all seem, like they extracted the dopamine-spiking pop formulas from Boston or Kansas or whoever with no regard for the musical traditions those artists drew on. Cold Chisel doesn’t do this at all! The prominent piano and rollicking guitars keep the band rooted in boozy good times and bluesy hard-rock tradition, and they even bust down a half-decent little rockabilly shuffle on “Rising Sun”. The problem is that their songs are just not that memorable or interesting, and theirs is a style that lives and dies on choruses that take weeks if not months to dislodge from your grey matter. I’m still rooting for Cold Chisel over Journey or Bryan Adams, which is to say, barely.

VERDICT: SKIP

Alberta Hunter - Amtrak Blues

Now here’s a real change of pace! Miss Alberta Hunter, eighty-five years of age in 1980, is a genuine 1920s vaudeville star— Bessie Smith’s classic “Down Hearted Blues?” Hunter wrote the lyrics to the damn thing. She was briefly in a band with Louis fucking Armstrong. I cannot imagine the sort of uncultured swine who wouldn’t automatically respect this woman just for putting in the time on the sort of thankless grind 99% of modern artists couldn’t fathom. On top of that, since most dixieland jazz sounds intrinsically ancient to my ears anyway, Hunter’s wizened voice strikes me as a perfect fit for her style. It’s easy to forget that this stuff used to be downright scandalous, and Hunter, who got her start singing in a bordello, offers a potent reminder of that with both her taste for playful, innuendo-laden lyrics and her effortlessly loose sense of rhythm. Much like with Professor Longhair, a ZAMN feels not just disingenuous but disrespectful here. If there’s one thing I took away from Amtrak Blues, it’s that Alberta Hunter does not need my approval or anyone’s. Mindset of the week: Most folks nowadays / Say old-fashioned ways / Should give place to things that are new / But somehow, I hold / To things that are old / Perhaps it’s an old-fashioned view

VERDICT: NICE

Grace Jones - Warm Leatherette

All the gays go gaga for Grace Jones, but now that disco sucks, what’s a Disco Queen to do? Well, show you don’t need disco to slay, naturally! Warm Leatherette casts an admirably wide stylistic net, largely rooted in reggae but totally unafraid to venture outside Jamaica for a bit of rockin’ new wave. After months of new wave albums with one or two obligatory mid reggae songs each, it’s certainly a refreshing inversion of an established formula, doubly so for a couple of those aforementioned rockers outclassing a good chunk of what’s been coming out of the UK lately. Her rendition of Roxy Music’s “Love is the Drug” is an absolute revelation, a breathless, forceful and altogether sexy dancefloor banger, and Barry Reynolds’ “Bullshit” is the exact right sort of on-the-nose for Jones’ blunt delivery. This bold stylistic reinvention isn’t without growing pains, though: her version of “Private Life” is no less of a drag than the Pretenders’ version, and she’s too stiff to know what to do with Tom Petty’s “Shakedown”.

VERDICT: NICE

Graduate - Acting My Age

And here I was convinced I wouldn’t hear a more diligent power pop pander than Buy American all week! These guys are every bit the slavish My Generation worshippers The Knack are, but come off a lot more charming for it by being actual teenagers themselves, rather than merely dating them. Plus, they like ska, so they’re not total ripoffs— What’s your excuse, Doug Feiger? Frontboy Roland Orzabal musters a worthy exorcism of teen angst on the titular opener (throw ‘em a runner-up mindset of the week for There’s no god, there’s no church in me / There’s an evil that lurks in me / Can’t you see?), one of the singles is a funny little 2-tone number called “Elvis Should Play Ska” (I thought they were singing every shiftless guy at first, heh), and the other single is an annoyingly earwormy little flute riff called “Ever Met A Day”. The remainder offers plenty of competent three-part harmonies and satisfying power-chord riffs, but these kids have a ways to go yet before they’re out from under the shadow of their heroes.

VERDICT: FINE

Al di Meola - Splendido Hotel

I went into this celebrated jazz fusion guitarist’s fourth solo effort bracing for something sort of sterile and nouveau-riche purely based off of the title, and well, I can’t quite say the album defied those expectations, but I definitely liked it more than I thought I would, albeit not by a whole helluva lot. It’s certainly overproduced, full of garish synthesizer bloops and theremins, even fuller of marimbas, and it’s overlong to boot— thank goodness it kept putting me to sleep before the interminable eleven minutes of “Isfahan”! Al di also takes the microphone on album lowlight “I Can Tell”, to mawkish and greasy results. Stick to guitar, bozo! I can’t pretend to be enough of a jazz snob to truly dislike this, though. Those synth bloops generally come across rather cute and fun, “Roller Jubilee” makes nicely breezy use of a four-on-the-floor dance beat, and the aptly-titled “Dinner Music of the Gods” offers up all the shredding fusion wankery you could ever hope for from a guy who rose to prominence in a band called “Return to Forever”. Mostly pleasant but not my thing; I’ll leave it to the experts to weigh the crimes against good jazztaste.

VERDICT: FINE