Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2012: P

AMANDA PALMER & THE GRAND THEFT ORCHESTRA 

Theatre Is Evil 

(8 Ft.)

After the stripped-down self-indulgence of Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radio Head on Her Magical Ukele and Several Attempts to Cover Songs by the Velvet Underground & Lou Reed, this return to studio form by the former Dresden Doll is a welcome reminder of how powerful she can be when she gets serious from within walls of sound.  She can still come off exhibitionistic: Complaining and boasting about her own sensitivity for seven minutes in “Trout Mask Replica,” she makes one wish she’d cover “He Hit Me (and It Felt like a Kiss).”  But give her points for universalizing the tragic-comic details of performing-artist promiscuity (“Do It with a Rockstar”), hating omnipresent cameras (“Smile [Pictures or It Didn’t Happen]”), and leaving her ukelele at home.

PERFUME GENIUS 

Put Your Back N 2 It 

(Matador)

With society’s increasing tolerance for homosexuality has come a corresponding tolerance for homosexual love songs, but tolerance and enjoyment are two different things.  And therein lies Mike Hadreas’s--a.k.a. Perfume Genius’s--challenge.  From the swim-team pecs on Put Your Back N 2 It‘s cover to the “Hood” video in which Hadreas cuddles with a porn actor, there’s none of the ambiguity that gay singer-songwriters have traditionally used to help straights universalize a gay song’s dramatic situation.  So if anything is going to put Perfume Genius over, it isn’t the quiet desperation of Hadreas’s vocals but his music’s gauzily sad, lazily hymn-like languor, about which the following observations: Fans of Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks music will love it, and, compared to Justin Vernon, Hadreas sounds like Bruce Springsteen.

Personal Space: Electronic Soul 1974-1984 

(Chocolate Industries)

You want obscure?  How about this--seventeen songs by fifteen acts, none of whom have a Wikipedia entry and only four of whom merit a mention at Allmusic.com.  The subtitle sets the stylistic and chronological parameters, but “blaxploitation-film soundtrack” would’ve done just as well.  Amid spacey soundscapes, slinky-moist synthesizers punctuate reified ghetto emotions recollected in tranquility: “Can’t pay the rent, can’t drive my car without money” (Spontaneous Overthrow, “Money”); “Gather, all you saints of God, / it’s time to go with Jesus Christ” (Otis G Johnson, “Time to Go Home”); “When you’ve got a freaky feelin’, baby, and you discover that your body is willin’, ... are you ready to come” (U.S. Aries, “Are You Ready to Come”)?  It wasn’t recorded inside Sly Stone’s head, obviously, but it could’ve been.

PUBLIC IMAGE LTD. 

This Is PiL 

(PiL Official)

The former Johnny Rotten inaugurates his first Public Image Ltd. album in twenty years by declaring, “This is PiL,” pronouncing it “pill” and even spelling it out.  Then, one song later, atop an uptempo Middle Eastern reggae beat, he declares “I am John, and I was born in London! / I am no vulture, this is my culture!”  Obviously, the hiatus has him worrying that people may have forgotten him although he has long been to punk what Jerry West is to the NBA logo.  Whatever.  The insecurity has inspired him and his latest cohorts to record music as aggressive and skeletal an any bearing the PiL imprint since Album if not Metal Box.  Drums, bass, guitar noise, misanthropy, and whatever the ridiculously catchy “Lollipop Opera” is rule.  And then some.

Illinois Entertainer 2012: R

PiL CD Box II (1992)

(As solicited by, but never published in, Rock & Roll Disc …)

Public Image Ltd.
PiL CD Box II (Japanese import)
Columbia COCY 9338-41
Producers: Martin Atkins, Gary Langan, Bill Laswell, John Lydon, Bob Miller, Public Image Ltd.
Engineers: John Corsaro, Bob Miller
Total disc times: 36:31; 40:54; 35:17; 45:52; 12:44 (no SPARS code)

Merit: **
Sound: ****

The next time you’re in a Tokyo record store with eighty dollars burning a hole in your wallet and a desire to inflict some nihilistic blare upon your ears, do not buy this boxed set.

Not that PiL CD Box II doesn’t contain some of John Lydon’s finest howlings from the void, but all it does is repackage--without bonus tracks or alternate takes--four-and-a-half previously released PiL albums circa 1983-1987, each of which you can buy individually and at a cheaper total cost.

Oh yeah, you also get a fifty-five-page booklet that annotates each disc, details the sixteen or so PiL lineups, and provides full lyrics, rare photos, and a band history.

Too bad most of it’s in Japanese.

So my two-star merit rating is based more on the economics of this set than on its content. At a total time of three hours, eleven minutes, and eighteen seconds, the thirty-six songs could’ve easily fit onto three CDs, a move that could’ve knocked a few bucks off the price and still left room for 1989’s Nine. Lydon is forever carping about the materialism of his former manager Malcolm McLaren, but PiL CD Box II is a pretty fair rock-and-roll swindle itself.

Still, suppose someone were to buy this doorstop for you. What would you end up with?

You’d get Compact Disc (a.k.a. Album and Cassette), the 1986 album Bill Laswell co-produced for Lydon and for which he assembled an all-star band that included Steve Vai, Bernie Worrell, Tony Williams, and Ginger Baker. Until 1992’s That What Is Not, it contained the heaviest and sharpest post-Metal Box music recorded under the PiL imprint.

You’d also get This Is What You Want, This Is What You Get (1984), which is almost as good. What put it on many critics’ turd lists was its skimpiness (thirty-six minutes), Lydon’s replacement of Keith Levene’s guitar parts with those of Colin Moore, and a horn-marred version of the single “This Is Not a Love Song.” Nevertheless, J. Kordosh, writing in Creem, captured its impact best when he said the album was probably one of the best of ’84 because it made him want to rip it off the turntable and throw it out the window.

Next, you’d get a maxi-single with “Blue Water” and two versions of “This Is Not a Love Song” (the horn-free original plus a tasteful remix), a configuration that can still be found as an import EP that adds PiL’s 1978 anthem “Public Image.” (So, like, why not include that configuration here?)

Last, you’d get Happy? (the three best songs of which are on the 1990 PiL compilation Greatest Hits So Far) and 1983’s notoriously lame Live in Tokyo. (Lydon was in fine form for the show, but the members of his band--PiL lineup number eleven according to the booklet--played as if they were sight reading, which they might’ve been.)

Since this box’s title is PiL CD Box II, I assume there’s a PiL CD Box I containing Public Image (a.k.a. First Edition, 1978), Metal Box (’79), the live Paris Au Printemps (’80), and Flowers of Romance (’81). If in fact there is, it’s a killer.

But if it costs eighty bucks, it’s a rip-off too.