Music: New Releases, October 2011 Volume 2

Bjork

Biophilia

Not owning an iPad, I can’t speak to the overall goals of this app-centric project, which promises the opportunity for exploration, interaction, and didacticism. I’m left feeling something of a Luddite for having nothing to talk about but the darn music. Still, we are talking Bjork here, which means that the music is always going to be fascinating, and the vocals like nothing you’ll hear outside of the spheres of heaven.

And that’s more or less a propos, as what we have here is basically the creation of heaven and earth as reflected in the flesh and blood of the human body. “Moon” opens the album with gently plucked strings, as Bjork urgently breathes “The lukewarm hands of their gods came down / And gently picked my adrenaline pearls / They paste them in their mouths / And rinse all of their fear out with their saliva.” “Cosmology” emerges out of an ascending swell of synth-and-chorus that sounds for all the world like vintage Moody Blues, and against a pulsing heartbeat, Bjork tells a few alternate versions of the big bang (“A silver fox and her cunning mate / Began to sing a song that became the world we know / And they say back then our universe was a cold black egg / Until the god inside burst out / And from its shattered shell / He made what became the world we know”).

… what we have here is basically the creation of heaven and earth as reflected in the flesh and blood of the human body.

Maybe the most fascinating track is “Virus,” with its tinkling, child-like piano and disturbing intimacy (“Like a virus needs a body / As Soft tissue feeds on blood / Some day I’ll find you / Like a mushroom on a tree trunk as the protein transmutates / I knock on your skin and I am in“). “Sacrifice” and “Mutual Core” seem to shudder in the face of nature’s awesome power (“I shuffle around the tectonic plates in my chest“), reminding us that a woman living in a land that ranges from forbidding cold to volcanic savagery may view the beauty of nature in terrified awe, not touristy Kodak moments. “Solstice” draws back to take it all in, wrapping up the album with a quavering vocal set against a Japanese scale and a final benediction: “You are a light bearer / Receiving radiance from others.” A damned impressive achievement, and I think I’d better go borrow an iPad from someone.

Ryan Adams

Ashes & Fire

Twenty years in the biz should, you’d imagine, have allowed Adams to finally decide if he wants to grow up to be Neil Young or Paul Westerberg; too often he seems to settle for something in the middle: Don Henley with a hangover, maybe. Oddly, it was last year’s thrown-together odds ‘n’ sods collection, III / IV, that seemed to suggest that he’d managed to find an actual blend between the roughness of rock and roll and the emotional directness of country without losing himself in the process. Evidently the first all-new album from the newly-sober Adams, Ashes & Fire is about as far from III / IV as one could imagine at this point, precise and restrained, liberally dosed with alt-country clichés. It’s hardly unlistenable, but when there are guys like Ryan Bingham and the Avett Brothers out there redefining the alt-country genre and challenging its preconceptions, Ashes & Fire feels a bit too safe a retreat.

…it’s as if this is what Adams imagines sobriety should sound like: surrender to easy sentiment…

Tracks like “Dirty Rain,” “Invisible Riverside,” or “Lucky Now,” are songs of a young man’s confusion: “I feel like somebody I don’t know / Are we really who we used to be? Am I really who I was?” And while I suppose we’ve all felt that way at one time or another, 36 is perhaps a bit long in the tooth to still be convincing as emotional driftwood. Taken song by song, there’s some nice stuff here, and in tracks like “Chains of Love,” the title song, and the epic “Do I Wait” (“I been waiting here all night / If you’re not gonna show / Then we’re not gonna fight“), something resembling personality breaks through. But too often, the emotional core of the songs feels received; it’s as if this is what Adams imagines sobriety should sound like: surrender to easy sentiment that forms a generic patina over life’s real pain.

Mayer Hawthorne

How Do You Do

It’s kind of interesting that we’re now into third-generation retro-soul: while Hawthorne genuflects to Marvin and Barry and Curtis, his album is most successful when he’s paying homage to white musicians of the 70’s who took the great soul men as their models: in other words, this album is clearly the work of a man who’s worn out a few copies of Silk Degrees, Katy Lied, and Minute By Minute.

The only real misstep takes place at the beginning: the opener, “Get to Know You” is a sort of Barry-White-by-way-of Chi-Lites move that underscores Hawthorne’s biggest weakness: he’s not much more than adequate as a singer. He can hit the notes OK, even manages not to embarrass himself in falsetto, but what separated the great soul men from the hundreds you never heard of was a voice that had the power of personality behind it; whether huge like Otis or gentle like Smokey, there was command and communication in every phrase. And even as Hawthorne grows and refines as a singer, he would appear to simply lack the basic equipment for that kind of vocal control (and his spoken intro is painfully awkward). Fortunately, the man knows his classic production, can spin an instantly-memorable tune, and has an ear for the hook that just won’t quit.

…clearly the work of a man who’s worn out a few copies of Silk Degrees, Katy Lied, and Minute By Minute.

“A Long Time” puts things immediately to rights, a defiant paean to the recovery of Hawthorne’s beloved Detroit, with snaky Jeff Baxter-style guitar over a silky rhythm track. The album really hits its stride with the triptych that anchors the middle: “Finally Falling,” “Hooked”, and “The Walk,” in which our hero has to decide if his inamorata’s “luxurious hair” and “cocoa butter skin” make up for her “shitty fuckin’ attitude” (Your looks had me putty in your hands / But I’ve had as much as I can stand /You can walk your long legs right out of my life“). And none of them will leave your brain for days. He finds connections between Tyrone Davis and ELO on “Dreaming” (which wistfully paints romantic trouble as eco-disaster); there’s sly finger-snapping in “Stick Around,” sinister toy piano on “The News,” and Snoop Dogg harmonies on the majestic Gamble-Huff rip “Can’t Stop.” The bonus edition adds the club-hopping “Henny and Ginger Ale,” aka “Got To Give It Up” for the 21st century.

Erasure

Tomorrow’s World

In the wake of Mayer Hawthorne’s triumphant white soul outing, Erasure’s latest feels like a bit of bad timing. Vince Clarke left Depeche Mode to find a way to craft soul music for synths, and he knocked it out of the park when he ran across Alison Moyet: her voice is one of those rare instruments that genuinely deserves to be called “timeless.” After the breakup of Yaz, though Erasure seemed to thrive on cheesy 80?s clichés, rather than in any way transcending them.

…songs that sound like they’re intended as floor-fillers… just feel limp, without the snap that’s needed to kick things into a higher gear.

Grabbing Frankmusik for production brings the lads right up to date, but songs that sound like they’re intended as floor-fillers (“Fill Us With Fire,” “A Whole Lotta Love Run Riot”) just feel limp, without the snap that’s needed to kick things into a higher gear, and the rehashed melodies don’t do much to compensate. Lyrically, the album staggers between the self-pitying and the obvious (“Everybody seems to have their own point of view“—no, really?), though I have to admit that hearing Andy Bell declare that he’s “sick of this techno” is probably funnier than it has any right to be. I’ll also admit that, if Bell’s voice works better for you than it does for me (I find him overwrought where Moyet was intense), you’ll probably get more out of this than I did. And give Frankmusik and engineer Rob Orton credit: the album sounds as plush and polished as anything Clarke and Bell have ever done.