Help: A Charity Project for the Children of Bosnia (1995)

(As published in Kamikaze ... )

Help: A Charity Project for the Children of Bosnia
(Go! Discs/London)

Various-artists charity albums are a dime a dozen, and only two in the history of the tradition--The Concert for Bangla Desh (1971) and We Are the World (1985)--have made more than a scratch on the surface of the indifference they were meant to demolish. And since both of those saw the millions they raised go astray due to financial mismanagement and-or naiveté--well, let's just say genuine do-gooders would be well advised to find a more effective means of doing good than buying CDs.

But the fact that Help: A Charity Project for the Children of Bosnia probably won't improve the lives of Bosnian children much doesn't mean you shouldn't buy it for its music, which, song for song, makes for a pretty solid sampler of contemporary Brit-pop. Oasis featuring Johnny Depp on guitar leads off with a George-Michael-ish ditty called "Fade Away," Paul Weller, Oasis's Noel Gallagher, and Paul McCartney conclude with "Come Together," and in between, such flavors of the month as the Boo Radleys, Stone Roses and Blur take turns performing tracks of intermittent hummability recorded especially for this project and therefore unavailable anywhere else.

The highlights occur when Sinead O'Connor recreates "Ode to Billy Joe" as a New Age folk song, Manic Street Preachers attempt "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head," and the One World Orchestra transform Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven theme into a hip-hop flavored novelty called "The Magnificent." None of these twenty tracks, obviously, have much to do with charity, children, or Bosnia, and the lone actual protest song, Robert Wyatt's "Shipbuilding" as performed by (the London) Suede, concerns the Falkland crisis of a decade-or-so ago. But if only as a reminder of what used to make K-Tel and Ronco collections so much fun, Help deserves to have a few bucks dropped into its hat.

The Denison/Kimball Trio: "Almost Rockin'"! (1994)

(As published in B-Side ... )

In the November 1994 issue of the Illinois Entertainer, J. Kevin Unsell concluded his review of the Denison/Kimball Trio's debut album, Walls in the City, thus: "I cannot heap enough praise on this recording.... The Denison/Kimball Trio leads the pack for unstructured, avant-jazz genius."

Unsell errs in calling the Denison/Kimball Trio’s music "unstructured" (it's not). But he's right when he says that Denison/Kimball "lead the pack" of alternative jazz types.

Of course, it's not exactly a burgeoning field--or is it?

"There are some other bands in Chicago doing instrumental, jazz-like kinds of things," reports Jim Kimball, the Trio's drummer. "There's nothing exactly like we're doing though."

There’s certainly no other “trio” with only two members. Although their forthcoming second album, Soul Machine, features special guests, Kimball and his guitarist buddy Duane Denison (of Jesus Lizard renown) make ninety-five percent of their music unassisted.

And Kimball doesn't consider their music "jazz."

"Jazzy," he corrects. "I consider myself more of a rock drummer, and Duane considers himself a rock guitarist, I think. We're not going to get a big attitude as if we're some kind of ‘jazz’ musicians, which we aren't."

Nevertheless, Kimball cites Buddy Rich and Max Roach as his earliest drum heroes, and on Soul Machine the "trio" tackles Ornette Coleman's 1959 classic, “Lonely Woman.”

"We do it more upbeat," Kimball says, "kind of rockin', almost Latiny. It sounds different than any other version I've ever heard of it."

In a sense, Soul Machine is Denison/Kimball's real debut. Walls in the City captures many of the duo's strengths, but its functioning as the soundtrack to the Jim Sikora film of the same name inevitably limits the number of ways one can hear it.

"Duane pieced together things that were appropriate for different scenes in the movie,” says Kimball. “Then, when we were in the studio, we were actually watching the movie and playing to the action for about a third of the record.”

He prefers Soul Machine’s wider sonic variety.

"It’s a lot more well rounded. We had extra musicians play--keyboards on one song, sax on one song, and bass on one song. The first one's kind of themey soundtrack music. Soul Machine has some soft stuff and some more aggressive stuff that's almost rockin'."

Still, Walls in the City has charms of its own. Perhaps because such "jazzy"-ness represents one of the bigger steps that alternative rockers have taken away from grunge-for-grunge's sake, it sounds soothing, if not quite smooth. Denison's rigorously rippling guitar work, even in the service of quieter textures, sees to that.

"Duane's a genius," Kimball chuckles. "He's really a lot of fun to play with because he has so many ideas. So some of the stuff on the new record is really free. We recorded two or three of the tracks the first time we played them. And though Duane has written most of the material, there's a lot of space for me to do whatever I want within the context of the song.

"There are only two of us,” he says, “so there's a lot of space. And some of it needs to be filled up."

Dog's Eye View: Happy Nowhere (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Dog's Eye View
Happy Nowhere
(Columbia)

The real problem here isn't Peter Stuart's material so much as his inability to distance himself from it. In every song he holds a magnifying glass up to his ups, his downs, his pleasures, his pains, writing so particularly that he not only misses the forest for the trees but almost misses the trees for the bark as well. Or, as he sings half-truthfully in "Would You Be Willing," "It's hard for me to say things / without joking around and around and around." The whole truth is that it's hard for him to say things period. For what other reason would he spend fifty-eight minutes and thirteen songs trying and not succeeding? And who but someone apparently unfamiliar with Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, and Leiber and Stoller would ever think "joking around and around and around" was a no-no?

Passengers: Original Soundtracks 1 (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Passengers
Original Soundtracks 1
(Island)

The last time Bono, the Edge, Larry Mullen, Jr., and Adam Clayton worked with Brian Eno, they called themselves U2 and their album Zooropa. This time they're calling themselves Passengers and their album Original Soundtracks 1 because the fourteen songs are based on films, a few of which actually exist. (In an instance of life imitating art, one of the songs from an imaginary film, "Always Forever Now," has turned up on the soundtrack to Heat.) As for why the Irish foursome is calling itself Passengers, well, maybe it's because they're just along for the ride.

As instrumentalists, none of the U2 fellows make themselves individually heard. Any sounds generated by the Edge, Mullen, and Clayton have been sampled and morphed by Eno until they sound like Tangerine Dream. Bono, on the other hand--especially on "Slug," "Your Blue Room," "Always Forever Now," and "Miss Sarajevo"--shines, his understated (for once) vocals wafting eerily through Eno's swirly effects. "Miss Sarajevo" even comes with a cameo from Luciano Pavarotti, who, of course, upstages Bono. The rest is your basic music from the hearts of the space between Eno's ears. Not a bad place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

P.M. Dawn: Jesus Wept (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

P.M. Dawn
Jesus Wept
(Gee Street/Island)

With Jesus Wept P.M. Dawn distill their pet sounds so thoroughly that those who prefer the duo's soulful effervescence to their ectoplasmic aura may find songs like "Miles from Anything," "A Lifetime," and "Forever Damaged" antiseptic, not to mention fleshless. It's not that they lack the Cordes Brothers' dreamy vocal meringue, a commodity available here in abundance, but they do lack a reason to exist other than for Prince Be/Reasons and J.C./The Eternal to share the latest results of their not-all-that-transcendental meditation.

Those results include self-congratulatory conundrums like "God said 'I guess you don't know I'm you / because you know the entire 360'," "Everything you do affects me like I'm you because I am," "There you are to kiss me / Must you always live right now?," and "Can you see me? / I'm divinity / and I can mean so much to you." Lyrics of similar mystagoguery befog almost every other song, setting the tone for an album that finds itself adrift on plenary bliss far too often.

Yet sometimes the kooky moments are also hooky. Radio junkies already know that "Downtown Venus" rocks, gimmicky mix and all, and with luck they might also get to appreciate "Apathy ..Superstar!?" and "9:45 Wake-Up Dream," both of which unfold gracefully amid mid-tempo arrangements and melodies that hold on with both hands. But who could've predicted the unpretentiously unplugged eight-minute medley of Prince's "1999," Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime," and Harry Nilsson's "Coconut" that ends the album? It’s almost epiphany enough to make the devout forgive the Cordes for never once referring to Lazarus--over whom Jesus wept in the first place.

Carlton Pearson: Live at Azusa (1995)

(As published in Offbeat ... )

Carlton Pearson
Live at Azusa
(Warner Alliance)

Pastor Carlton Pearson not only looks ill-suited to the task of fronting this excellent live gospel album, he sounds it too. In other words, if his tailor-made, powder-blue suit and sweatless, bespectacled countenance make him look like a cross between an up-and-coming young executive and a doctoral candidate in psychology, his run-of-the-mill singing and rote exhortations ("I'm not talkin' 'bout what you wear, I'm talkin' 'bout what you are!") might make you wonder why he has both a record deal and a pulpit to begin with.

The answer is that he also has the Azusa Mass Choir--a one hundred-or-so-voice ensemble that under his directions rises, recedes, rocks, rolls, and roars like a giant who knows how to sing from his diaphragm as well as from his heart. They, not Pearson, are the stars of Live at Azusa. True, a couple of inspired solo cameos steal the spotlight every now and then. Karen Clark's eight-minutes of shouting, rapping, and scatting on "Take It by Force" deserve a Grammy category all their own. And twelve minutes of Daryl Coley singing "In the Arms of Jesus" won't hurt sales of his solo albums any.

But the choir, whoever they are (the eight-panel CD booklet has room for everything but their names), reclaim the album soon enough, starting with the "Hallelujah, He Reigns/Awesome God/Our God Reigns" medley and climaxing with the twenty-three-minute "Old Songs Medley." Singing whatever standards that Pearson's folksy reminiscences of growing up in church remind him of, the Azusa Mass Choir begin with a rollicking "Hold to God's Unchanging Hand" and wind down with a contemplative "I Feel like Going On." And if you've never heard a one hundred-voice gospel choir get contemplative, you're in for a treat for which no amount of hours spent with the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos can prepare you.

Quincy Jones: Q's Jook Joint (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Quincy Jones
Q's Jook Joint
(Qwest/Warner Bros.)

This sumptuous tribute to, and proof of, the diversity and staying power of black popular music juxtaposes and celebrates jazz, quiet storm, rap, funk, R&B, and a few related demi-genres--in short, every kind of music with which Quincy Jones has been involved at one time or another during the last fifty years. In a sense, Q's Jook Joint is as much a tribute to Jones as it is to the music he loves, for only a musician with exceptional talent, flexibility, humor, and financial acumen could have thrived in the mercurial pop-music world the way he has for so long.

For that matter, who but an exceptional human being could snap his fingers and get eighty-three name performers to help out with his latest album? Each of these thirteen songs features an imaginatively selected all-star cast, and not one of them--not "Let the Good Times Roll" featuring Stevie Wonder, Bono, and Ray Charles, not "Slow Jams" featuring Babyface, SWV, Portrait, and Barry White, not "Is It Love That We're Missin'" featuring Gloria Estefan and Herbie Hancock--sags or creaks under the weight. Far from showing off, each performer acts like a team player, and as a result the music, more than the musicians, makes the joint jump.

Perhaps one can best gauge the scope of Jones' accomplishment by appreciating his ability to make the familiar exciting. By pairing Tone Lōc with Queen Latifah on the forty-year-old "Cool Joe, Mean Joe," for instance, he recalls what was good about both the fifties and pre-gangsta rap. He does the same for Me-Decade disco by turning "Rock with You" (the Michael Jackson hit Jones produced), "Stomp" (ditto the Brothers Johnson), and "Stuff like That" (ditto Ashford and Simpson) into move-bustin' motherfunkers every bit the equal of anything to which the current crop of Soul Train dancers is shaking booty.

That's nothing, however, compared to the wonderful performance he gets out of Phil Collins by turning over to him the lead vocal of Duke Ellington's "Do Nothin' Till You Hear from Me." Should this album win all the Grammies it deserves--well, that's just one more familiar thing it will have breathed life into.

Smoking Popes: Brothers in Arms (1995)

(As published in B-Side ... )

There's a lot to like about Chicago's Smoking Popes.

First, there's the name, a casually provocative moniker in a scene overrun with desperately overreaching ones. Second, there's the restraint: In a scene overrun with hour-plus CDs, the under-thirty-minute length of Born to Quit, the quartet's second album and first for Capitol, comes as sweet relief.

And, of course, there's the music, catchy garage pop that, like the band's name, doesn't so much push the envelope as delight in licking the stamp. Which stamp? Why, Elvis obviously. But which Elvis? The young, skinny one or the old, fat one?

"Elvis Costello,” says Josh Caterer, Smoking Popes’ lead singer and one of three Caterer brothers in the band. “I would say he’s my all-time favorite musician. His singing moves me more than any other singer's. And I like all his stuff, although I'm apparently one of the few people who do."

Caterer isn't kidding--he even likes Kojak Variety. But the real significance of his Costello worship lies in what it puts the lie to: namely, that Caterer’s tender tenor singing must betoken a Morrissey jones. It doesn't. It betokens a Rat Pack-era crooner jones--sort of.

"I do have a great affection for that kind of music and that kind of singing," he confesses, "but it's not any deeper than my affection for other kinds of music." Nevertheless, between his and his father's record collections, he has access to more crooner pop than the average up-and-coming twenty-something rocker. And since his signing to a major label, his access has improved.

"I have a ton of Frank Sinatra because we're on Capitol, and we, um, get all that stuff for free. My favorite one is At the Sands with Count Basie. But I also really enjoy Sinatra and the Sextette Live in Paris and In the Wee Small Hours.”

O.K., so he didn’t mention September of My Years or She Shot Me Down (probably because those were on Reprise). Still, Caterer’s no crooner dilettante. He can also go on about Mel Torme, Johnny Mathis, Nat "King" Cole ("although he's a little different from those other guys"), and Judy Garland.

"I really like Judy Garland, but sometimes her singing is so heavy that I can't listen to it because it affects me too profoundly, especially later Judy Garland, when she really started to belt. You can't really use Garland as background music. You just have to turn the lights down and get into it."

Speaking of turning down the lights and getting into it, a lot of Smoking Popes fans spent the summer of '95 doing just that as the band traveled the club circuit with Goo Goo Dolls and Australia's You Am I. But despite Josh's ready praise for both You Am I ("They're a great band") and the Goo Goo Dolls ("Everybody went crazy for those guys"), at least one reporter thought Smoking Popes stole the show.

"Capitol's Smoking Popes won the crowd over," wrote Reuter's Troy Augusto of the night the tour played Hollywood. "Josh Caterer sang his charming love songs with a graceful nonchalance, and his brothers Eli and Matt, guitarist and bassist, respectively, added gritty muscle...."

"Well," says Caterer, "you can never trust a review of a show because it depends too much on the mood of the reviewer and where he's sitting or standing."

So much for hubris. Actually, Caterer's refusal to admit that his band might've, well, "smoked" that night is characteristic of his soft-spoken humility in general. And since humility's a liberating thing, it enables him, his brothers, and their drummer, Mike Felumlee, to play their energetic, three-minute songs for both more and less than mere attitude.

For example, not since tin-eared baby boomers thought John Lennon was singing "The girl with colitis goes by" on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” has a band made a disease sound as embraceable as Smoking Popes do on "Rubella." Actually, it’s less an evocation of swelling glands than a love song for a girl with an embarrassing name. And it summarizes what the Caterers-Plus-One do best: support hummable melodies as crooned by Josh with hummable and slightly distorted power chords as strummed by Eli.

Perhaps the only thing the Popes do better is, in fact, smoke. "Let me see," says Caterer. "I've smoked for eight years now, since I was fifteen. We all smoke, although that would never been a requirement to get into the band."

One might expect Caterer to have an opinion about tobacco issues, like the irony of cigarettes becoming less and less legal at a time when the demand for marijuana legitimization has never been more bipartisan.

He doesn't.

"I try not to have opinions about social moods in general," he says. "and I think I'm a happier person for it."

As the upbeat nature of Born to Quit's ten songs suggest, Smoking Popes take their happiness seriously, even though, as with their other unique qualities, Caterer downplays its significance.

"I just happened to be interested in writing non-pessimistic, romantic songs at the time we were doing that record. They seemed all right, so we thought we'd run with it as a kind of theme for the record. But we actually have enough songs to record another album, and most of them have a little bit more of a somber feel to them."

Yet "somber" by Smoking Popes standards will probably still come off fairly chipper. Could the roots of the Caterer's contentment lie in the fact that their band is largely a family affair?

"That could explain it. Obviously, I get along very well with my brothers, and we get along very well with our parents. We've had a relatively stable home life, and, you know, I'm sure that's helped."

Judging from the evidence on Born to Quit, it certainly hasn’t hurt.

Beverly Crawford: Jesus, Precious King (1995)

(As published in Offbeat ... )

Beverly Crawford
Jesus, Precious King
(Warner Alliance)

This live set heats up pretty quickly for major-label gospel. No sooner has the MC exhorted the Nashville congregation to put their "hands together for a truly anointed vessel of the Lord" than Crawford, her Born Again Mass Choir, and the half-dozen or so musicians in her band launch into "We're Glad You're Here," a number that rousingly acknowledges both God and congregation. And even though the next two songs ease up and slow down more than they should, the title cut follows and sets things right by gathering momentum for ten suspenseful minutes and climaxing with a call-and-response sequence so hot it makes the fact that Crawford subjected this album to studio enhancement almost forgivable. Besides, since what was enhanced was almost certainly the horns and keyboards--two superfluous elements here anyway--one wonders why Warner Alliance didn't let the raw glory of the unretouched original stand on its own.

Nevertheless, the fast-slow-slow-fast pattern repeats throughout, providing Jesus, Precious King with a theme-and-variations structure that prevents the album from dissolving into predictability even when Crawford seems bent on doing so herself. The between-song preaching, for instance, could've been read off cue cards. And even the fact that Crawford does an impressive Tina Turner impersonation on the slow ones won't divert attentive listeners from noticing that her taste in lyrics tends toward the banal. But once the lady and her big-voiced choir get rockin' (like on the disc-closing "Come On Everybody," which for some reason fades just as it starts to boil), well, let's just say that not only will skeptics forgive the studio punch-ins, but they'll also forgive--if not forget--that the daughter Crawford thanks in her liner notes is named Latrina.

Abraham Laboriel: Guidum (1995)

(As published in Kamikaze ... )

Abraham Laboriel
Guidum
(Integrity)

Wynton Marsalis says that fusion isn't jazz, and he should know. But good fusion certainly has its share of jazzy moments, and Abraham Laboriel's Guidum is good fusion. Whether its appearing on the Christian-schlock label Integrity or its inclusion of songs called "Let My People Go" and "Out from Darkness" make it a gospel record is anyone's guess. But anyone with the good taste to have plunked for Koinonia's early-'80s gospel fusion albums, on which Laboriel played, should easily find Guidum a not-guilty pleasure.

What it does best is prove that, despite his years as one of pop music's busiest session bassists, Laboriel can command the spotlight plenty well on his own. Aside from the title cut and his solo-bass version of Henry Mancini's "Breakfast at Tiffany's," these instrumentals throb, glide, ricochet, and rock with a loose-limbed soulfulness usually associated with musicians half Laboriel's age.

Actually, a musician half Laboriel's age does play a role here: Laboriel's son, Abe Jr., who steals the show on several occasions with inventive and explosive drumming ("Out from Darkness"). And although the reedman Justo Almario and the keyboardist Greg Mathieson, whom Laboriel has entrusted with most of these melodies, won't have Wynton Marsalis changing his mind about fusion or the inferiority of electric instruments to unplugged ones any time soon, they might prove just the thing to lure fence-sitting listeners into a serious appreciation of Abe and Abe Jr.'s rhythmic muscle.

Kendra Smith : Au Naturel (1995)

(As published in B-Side ... )

In 1983, some of L.A.'s finest Paisley Undergrounders released an album of '60s and '70s cover songs called Rainy Day that people with good taste still dig out and play for two very good reasons: Kendra Smith singing Alex Chilton's “Holocaust” and Kendra Smith singing Buffalo Springfield's “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong.”

Now, with the release on 4AD of Five Ways of Disappearing, Smith's solo debut, fans of her haunting alto voice and richly textured music no longer have to dig out Rainy Day or the albums she made with the Dream Syndicate, Opal, or the Guild of Temporal Adventurers to experience her singular vision.

And her vision is nothing if not singular.

"I can understand and appreciate pop culture to a certain degree," she says. "But after studying Middle Eastern music and listening to the music of different cultures, I've learned that music is most powerful when it has a more immediate relationship to people's daily lives, instead of being something they just buy--when it has an actual magical function that can involve healing, catharsis, or taking you into other states of mind and actually putting you through alchemical types of transformations.

"All of which,” she concedes, “is a pretty lofty thing to aspire to."

If anyone can aspire that loftily, it’s Smith. She’s calling B-Side, for instance, from 4AD's offices because she herself has no phone. Or fax machine. Or electricity. She lives, in fact, an almost entirely rustic life "in the Eureka area" of California, the better to get in touch with the muses behind her music.

"I don't think people should make too big a deal about it," she says. "It's the way that I feel most comfortable at this time, but life has lots of changes."

Nevertheless, she recommends it "to anyone who can manage it."

"A lot of people try it, go crazy, and go screaming down the hill," she laughs. "That's not unknown up here. But if you're at all interested in exploring nature and your inner world, then the silence and the encounters you can have with natural life are just amazing."

People into getting back to nature sometimes get branded as sentimentalists, often because they are. But Smith isn’t one of them. Case in point: Five Ways of Disappearing's decidedly unsentimental “Maggots.” "Maggots, maggots," she sings over a jazzy shuffle, "What do you do? Maggots, maggots, doo doo doo."

"That song works on a couple of different levels," she explains. "It started out with an encounter I had with actual maggots when I was working on a farm. Then I dug out an old dictionary, and the definition for maggot was 'a whimsical notion,' and to be 'maggoty' was to be 'capricious.' And there's also the Buddhist meditation that involves envisioning your own corpse filled with maggots."

"It gives you," she says, "a certain perspective."

It’s a perspective that she’s not afraid to play with--she wrote, she says, several of the album's lyrics the William-S.-Burroughs-and-Brion-Gysin cut-up way. But her fascination with and comfort among the mysterious and creepy notwithstanding, her music on the whole evokes the somewhat more chipper spiritually cross-fertilized atmosphere of medieval Europe (her ringing cover of Richard and Mimi Farina's “Bold Marauder” sees to that) rather than the dimestore Halloween ambience of Goth or the black-clad morbidity of Nico, to whom she has been compared.

"I do find her interesting," Smith says, "but I think it's a slim comparison."

It is. Despite Smith's obsession with Nico’s favorite instrument, the harmonium--along with the pump organ, it sets the instrumental tone for much of her album--Smith, unlike Nico, has a genuinely lovely voice. Also, her affinity for life's maggoty side doesn't forbid her access to gorgeous folk melodies like “'In Your Head” and “Valley of the Morning Sun.”

"I'm dark,” she admits, “but I'm not troubled."

And she intends to stay that way. "I've made it my personal aim not to be hung up. And I've done what it takes to help me be in that condition. Obviously, that's something Nico totally bombed out at.

"I have been moved by music made by troubled people," she says, "and I think really troubled music can help you cathartically. But it can't take you past that point, and you can end up recycling that energy constantly.

"Obviously, there has to be an exit."

DC Talk: Jesus Freak (1995)

(As published in Kamikaze ... )

DC Talk
Jesus Freak
(Forefront)

For believers who experience vicarious affirmation from the mainstream success of contemporary Christian musicians, this album may seem too good to be true. Not only has it gone where no other Christian album has gone before (number sixteen during its first week in Billboard), but it rocks too, mining from its mixture of grunge, rap, and alternapop-in-general a soulfulness that most young bands--sacred or profane--wouldn't know from Adam.

Of course, Jesus Freak has predecessors. In 1981, four years before Amy Grant's first top-forty hit, Benny Hester snuck a song from one of his Myrrh albums onto the lower rungs of the singles charts, and the next year, After the Fire scored with a Falco song and toured with Van Halen. Somewhere in there, Cliff Richard notched a half-dozen U.S. hits, and even the one-hit wonder Charlene turned out to have a testimony. But these performers weren't nearly as in-your-face about their faith as DC Talk, who by calling their new album Jesus Freak have performed the Christian equivalent of NWA's calling their 1991 album Niggaz4life: taken a term of derision and rehabilitated it into an honorific.

In fact, Jesus Freak's most enduring cultural contribution may be its transformation of derogatory or essentially meaningless religious phrases--"so help me God," the overfamiliar Godspell lyrics of "Day by Day"--into spiritually potent slang, making it harder than it's been in some time to hear such phrases without pondering their deeper meanings. The last time DC Talk attempted such a recontextualization, they chose "Jesus Is Just Alright" and caught some flak for reviving a song that some considered blasphemous. But it worked--so well, actually, that the live version on the "Jesus Freak" CD single upstages "Jesus Freak" itself.

But what will secularized kids who get curious enough about this odd bestseller to buy or home-tape it make of what they hear? Chances are, they'll find plenty to like. "So Help Me God," the title cut, "Day by Day," and "Like It, Love It, Need It" stack shout-along hooks on a solid foundation of programmed percussion, metal guitars (courtesy mainly of the great Dann Huff), and vocal gymnastics ranging from Kevin Smith's Bono-esque wailing and Michael Tait's soulful soaring to Toby McKeehan's precision rapping. And the slow, introspective numbers ("What If I Stumble," "What Have We Become") maintain the creative tension by matching easy-going music with honest meditations on the flesh's demands on the spirit.

The album's only misstep is Track Thirteen. Untitled on the cover, it turns out to be one of Kevin Smith's "poems." Program around it, and hear why, at least for now, more people are listening to Jesus Freak than to almost any other new album in the land.

Boukman Eksperyans: Libète (Pran Pou Pran’l!) (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Boukman Eksperyans
Libète (Pran Pou Pran’l!)/Freedom (Let's Take It!)
(Mango)

Combining worldly rhythms and other-worldy invocations, Boukman Eksperyans creates the unsettling effect of making Haiti's infammatory mixture of superstition and corrupt politics seem seductive, and in so doing they've made the most political religious album and the most religious political album to come along in some time. The songs range from the soulfully sweet ("Ki Moun") to the sweetly soulful ("Zili," a prayer to the Virgin Mary with some Hoodoo for good measure), with lots more in between. In Peye Pou Peye" ("You Must Pay") and "Jou Male" ("Day of the Shock"), anti-oppressor choruses accompany vengefully rocking polyrhythms, and the liner notes decidate the album to a late bandmember whose death the band blames on President Clinton's medicine-impeding embargo. Despair, however, never rears its head, not with Boukman dancing all over it as if their lives depended on it--which in Haiti they probably do.

Southern Culture on the Skids: Finger-Lickin' Good (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

If the simultaneous ascendancy of Bill Clinton and Jeff Foxworthy hasn't convinced you that the South is rising again, maybe you should check out Dirt Track Date (DGC), the major-label debut by Southern Culture on the Skids.

Heating up their lyrics about white-trash decadence with a generously lubricated mixture of rockabilly, swamp choogle, and boozy blues, the one-woman, two-man band from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, comes on like genuinely stray cats who know it's both the heat and the humidity that put the woogie in the boogie.


They also know that by calling themselves Southern Culture anything and by looking like Jed Clampett's poor relations they run the risk of getting pigeon-holed as a "novelty act," the B-52s of hickdom.

"I'm getting tired of being written up as 'hayseed, crazy hillbillies--Go have a hoedown good time!'," fumes Mary Huff, Southern Culture's bass player and occasional lead singer. "Don't get me wrong. We are a total party band. But our music really rocks, too. We don't hide behind any kind of schtick."

And they don't. But if they had to they could probably hide behind Huff's hair, which is what is known in the vernacular as "big." Judging from the band's PR photos, her 'do adds at least a foot to her stature.

"It's hard work actually," she confesses, "but the end result is worth it. I prefer hot rollers to sponge rollers because they go up faster. Then I whip it up into a big concoction and tease it until it's nice and solid and stands up by itself. Then I need anywhere from a quarter to a half can of Aquanet. The fun part is putting it up. The nasty part is getting it out after a show in which it's been drenched in sweat. You have to rip out all the rats and start from square one the next day."

Huff has, in fact, become so identified with her hair that she maintains it "twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.” “Some days I think, 'I don't feel like doing this. I think I'll skip it.' Then I show up at the show and get yelled at and cursed at by people who have paid to see us. So I'm locked into doing it, I'm afraid."

Of course, most bands would kill for audiences that cared enough to curse at them for not doing their hair, and Southern Culture knows it. In fact, the band values its fans so much that it seldom come off the road. The constant touring provides the subject matter for at least one Dirt Track Date song, "Fried Chicken and Gasoline," a kind of "Running on Empty" for the kudzu crowd.

According to Rick Miller, the trio's all-purpose frontman and Huff's common-law husband, they also go out of their way to involve their fans in their shows.

"During 'Eight-Piece Box,' we'll hand out chicken. Sometimes we'll get a couple onstage and have them do the chicken mating dance while they slow-twist and feed each other drumsticks. Sometimes we'll get girls who look like they could eat five boxes of chicken, and they get up there and just devour it while we're playing! We even get girls who are exhibitionists and--well, let’s just say it's always an eye-opener. Chicken becomes a metaphor for many things."

Miller sees “Eight-Piece Box,” which comes replete with puns on "eating," "breasts," and "thighs," as an excavation of rock 'n' roll's original, double-entendre-enriched roots.

"A lot of people say, 'Oh, that's not serious,' but it's very serious. If you listen to old R&B or rock-and-roll, there are all kinds of songs like that. I also love the lyrics of a lot of '20s and '30s jazz songs, which can be so dirty--'Roll My Wiener,' 'Ice Cream Man,' all that stuff. It has that bawdy, earthy humor that I think is totally missing from a lot of records today."

Dirt Track Date's instrumentals convey the same dirty vibe. "Make Mayan a Hawaiian" staggers and sways like grass-skirted fat men in the wee hours of a luau. "Galley Slave" finds Huff making like an opera singer atop the sound of grunting oarsmen. "Skullbucket" rumbles with Link Wray-inspired raunch.

Miller likes telling stories about the group’s years on the road. Having opened for porn films, shared bills at prisons with the Void Brothers (a holy- rolling gospel act), and performed for naked spelunkers at a National Caving Association's all-night revelry, he has plenty to tell.

He’s even hung out with the rockabilly madman Hasil Adkins, whom Miller once watched eat a pound of raw ground round before a show.

"You know how it comes in those styrofoam trays with plastic over it? Well, he had made a little hole in the plastic, and, as he was talking to me, he pulled out strands and threw them into his mouth. He finished before the soundcheck started and then put on a hell of a show. I thought about trying it myself, but all I could think was 'trichinosis.'"

Raw hamburger, fried chicken, Aquanet, sweat -- it's all just more grease for Southern Culture's skids.

And they ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie.

Ear of the Dragon (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Ear of the Dragon
(Fortune 5)

As an Asian-American myself, I speak without prejudice when I say that this "first-ever compilation album of Asian-American rock 'n' roll" makes no sense. What cultural subgroup, after all, has fewer defining characteristics than ours, comprised as we are of the most thoroughly Americanized of America's adopted peoples?

Aside from Shonen Knife (who aren't included here as they're Asian-Asians) few if any rock bands with Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, or Hawaiian members sound significantly different from the average white band, the nineteen bands on this album included. From aMINIATURE's harsh blend of U2 and the Clash to Dolomite's evocation of Nick Drake, these sons of Oriental immigrants sound like suspiciously like descendants of pale Europeans.

The daughters offer some respite. Yanti Arifin sings "Losing My Cool" like Chryssie Hynde auditioning for the Waitresses, and Cub's Robynn Iwata sings "Secret Nothing" like someone who's spent lots of quality time under the boardwalk. But that still leaves fifteen bands, ranging from the wretched (J. Church, David Pajo Band) to the merely O.K. Lo-fi sound, low-flying melodies, and an uncanny resemblance to the boring parts of Urgh! A Music War predominate.

Wayne Kramer: The Hard Stuff (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Wayne Kramer
The Hard Stuff
(Epitaph)

Having perfected his punk-metal skronk as one fifth of the legendary MC5, Wayne Kramer can reasonably expect to sell a few thousand copies of this album on nostalgic name recognition alone. The good news is that although he hasn't taught his guitar any new tricks in the last twenty years, he still knows how to make it sound like a garage full of lawnmowers. The bad news is that not only does Kramer sing like a rock critic, but he also solicits lyrics from one in the person of Mick Farren. Even worse, Kramer's lyrics are worse than Farren's.

Farren: "We are deprived / of the self-destruct relief of wild-bunch conflict" ("The Realm of Pirate Kings"). Kramer: "Truth and love are my law and worship, / form and conscience my manifestation and guide" ("Poison"). Farren: "Those souls on TV ain't really crying. / They accept that they were born to die" ("Hope for Sale"). Kramer: "Wilson moved his family out of the city / where times are tough, life is fast and hard and gritty" ("Crack in the Universe").

So, Henry Rollins's gushing liner notes and the clever "Sharkskin Suit" notwithstanding, what The Hard Stuff amounts to is forty-seven minutes of revved-up, punk-metal guitar rock like they don't make anymore welded to songs that you hope they'll never write again.

Chris Mars: Tenterhooks (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Chris Mars
Tenterhooks
(Bar/None)

No one has ever accused this erstwhile Replacements drummer of singing pretty. Even so, not only do his vocals on Tenterhooks seem gratuitously Jonathan Richman-like, but they're also subjected to an answering-machine-sounding electronic tweaking that renders the lyrics barely intelligible.

All of which is too bad because, as the lyric sheet reveals, there's a curiously unresolved tension at work. Empathetic numbers like "Brother Song" and "Mary" (in which Mars tries to cheer up depressed loved ones) duel with sarcastic, pissed-off songs like "White Patty Rap," "Water Biscuits," and "E.I.B. Negative" (in which Mars disses clean rappers, Tupperware moms, and Rush Limbaugh and his audience respectively).

As for the music, it's as under-recorded as the vocals, making the Sesame Street jazz of "New Day" and the rinky-dink disco of "Water Biscuits" almost provocatively weird. As for "Hate It" and the B-movie instrumental "Floater," they clatter past like post-grunge little engines that could, as gleefully oblivious to grown-up production values as anything on The Shit Hits the Fans.

Shaw/Blades: Hallucination (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... ) Shaw/Blades Hallucination (Warner Bros.) Shaw is Tommy and Blades is Jack, and with Michael Cartellone on drums for three tracks and Ted Nugent gone huntin', Hallucination could almost pass for Damn Yankees Unplugged--except it sounds nothing like Damn Yankees. With dovetailing, reverb-free vocals that soar higher than the Eagles' and acoustic-guitar work to match, these eleven songs duck arena-scale pyrotechnics in favor of a campfire intimacy you don't have to be a Boy Scout to enjoy. The lyrics hold up too, what with the political cleverness of the title track ("We paid the price in Viet Nam / while crosses burned in Birmingham, / in Memphis now the church bells ring / while L.A. crowns a different King") and sober, cliché-free observations that make it sound as if life really might begin at forty ("The Night Goes On").

Held together by a mixture of inspired near-plagiarism (second-hand Tom Petty and Beatles haunt several cuts) and plain, old-fashioned attention to detail, Hallucination is a loose, gently rocking, stripped-down gem that proves no frills doesn't have to mean no thrills.

Bad Brains: God of Love (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Bad Brains
God of Love
(Maverick/Warner Bros.)

Mediocre Rastafarian music is like mediocre Christian music: You don't have to be a believer to give it the benefit of the doubt, but it helps. This goes quadruple for Bad Brains. Not only to you have to suspend the usual disbelief (Haili Selassie is Jesus and smoked dope is his sacrament?), but you also have to convince yourself that alternating reggae and heavy metal makes for a logical incarnation of the faith because God of Love won't convince you by itself.

Some of the metal isn't bad--all the cannabis in the world won't deaden the impact of reverie-wreckers like "Tongue Tee Tie" and the title cut, and "Thank Jah" is almost goofy enough for Funkadelic. If only the same could be said for the reggae, which comes off so generic that only a spliff the size of Warner's loss-leader budget could convince you it made you see God.

Between the extremes comes the non-metal, non-reggae "Rights of a Child," wherein H.R. asserts that "[e]very child has a right to be loved. / No baby, no baby is poor. / Our God has given us this." It sure beats the pro-life stuff blasting from the Bible bookstores.

Senser: Stacked Up (1995)

(As published in the Illinois Entertainer ... )

Senser
Stacked Up
(Atlas/Ultimate/A&M)

No matter what its music sounds like, when a band becomes known for its politics first and its music second, it's suffering from PPMS: Peter, Paul & Mary Syndrome. Senser, who has earned the praise of the British press for "raising" the public's awareness of facism and racism, suffers from PPMS big time. How much more aware of facism and racism can a politically correct person be these days?

Senser has also earned praise for having a female frontperson (Kerstin Haigh), a Saudi Arabian frontperson (Heitham Al-Sayed), and a killer smoke-and-light show. But neither demographic diversity nor visual special effects translate particularly well to CD, so Stacked Up lives and dies by its sound--a pummeling blend of Slayer-esque metal and hip-hop that will have moshers and other sensitive youth dropping like well-swatted horseflies and loving it.

But will sloganeering letter bombs like "What's Going On?" and "Eject" actually rock anyone's vote? Probably not, because with a Saudi rapping so fast that you notice little but the "fuck"s and a woman whose recipe for peace is "Breathe in, breathe out" ("Peace"), the finer points of Senser's worldview--assuming there are any--tend to get lost.