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(As published in Rock & Roll Disc ... )
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Black Moon
Victory 383 480 003-2
Producer: Mark Mancina
Engineer: Steve Kempster
Total disc time: 48:57 (no SPARS code)
Merit: **½
Sound: ****
The Atlantic Years (2 CDs)
Atlantic 7 82403-2
Producers: Various
Engineers: Various
Total disc times: 74:19, 76:26 (no SPARS code)
Merit: ***
Sound: ****
With the possible exception of the Knack, no band that emerged and made its fortune during the '70s has endured more negative criticism than Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Although four of their albums went top ten in the U.S., three more top twenty, and all of them even higher in Europe, no critic that I know of except Lester Bangs has ever been willing to risk his credentials and admit that ELP were anything other than a trio of pretentious dilettantes.
Which isn't to deny that on one level they were pretentious dilettantes. But they also possessed an anarchic streak that could be counted on to erupt with a magnificently perverse lack of propriety, especially live, where Keith Emerson's multi-keyboard screechfests fostered many a heavy-metal fantasy and Carl Palmer's drum solos encompassed a dazzling variety of percussion wizardry.
The group's weak link was Greg Lake--or, rather, his role in the group. As a bassist anchoring Emerson to Palmer, he was perfect; as a cosmic folksinger whose job it was to emote throughout fifteen-minute jams, he was hopeless (as anyone in his position would be). But democracy and pacing demanded that he take center stage as often as the other two, so he did, and therein lay the band's Achilles' heel.
Therein also lies the explanation for why Black Moon--named, apparently, for a lunar eclipse--shines forth only dimly. As the featured performer on seven of the ten songs, Lake ends up hogging the spotlight. His voice has gained resonance over the years, but he still writes lyrics like "Take my love into your breast. / Commit my spirit to the test. / You will see him like a knight. / His armor gleams..." and so on. Meanwhile, although Emerson piles on his share of industrial-strength progressiveness, Palmer's role has shrunk to little more than maintaining a steady four-four. All of which means that Black Moon finds ELP at their most conventional instead of at (or even near) their most daring.
The same can hardly be said of The Atlantic Years, a great-sounding two-CD, two-and-a-half-hour compilation featuring many of the lengthiest and most extreme exercises of ELP's first decade. "Tarkus" (twenty minutes), "Karn Evil 9" (thirty), "Pirates" (thirteen), and a fourteen-minute excerpt of the group's album-length Pictures at an Exhibition receive the digitally-remastered-from-the-original-master-tapes treatment to good effect. Now more than ever, one can admire the technological architecture of these rock equivalents of the Tower of Babel.
Yet ELP were at their strongest when blowing up that architecture, and by including only one cut, Ginastera's "Toccata," from the three-LP live album Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends (where many of these pieces are available in louder, gnarlier versions), and by editing the band's demolition of Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" from nine minutes to five, The Atlantic Years gives ELP's metal-machine power short shrift.
Not that fans won't find pockets of pleasure in these discs. Among Black Moon's highlights are Palmer's plundering of Queen's "We Will Rock You" beat for the entire seven minutes of the title track (even heard it on the Olympics!) and the unabashed virtuosity of the two full-band instrumentals, "Changing Staes" and Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet."
And The Atlantic Years, although it features too much Lake, sticks mainly to hummable Lake like "Lucky Man," "From the Beginning," and the surprisingly enduring "I Believe in Father Christmas" (in its original seven-inch, as opposed to the Works Volume Two, version).
But there's a lot of foggy-headed filler too, especially on Black Moon. And most of it bears Lake's name.
(As published in Rock & Roll Disc ... )
The Cult 
Ceremony
Sire/Reprise 26673-2
Total disc time: 63:18 (AAD)
Merit: **
Sound: ***
With lyrics like "The hip young dude stood passionately succumbing to the he-dog sound," this Native American heavy-metal concept album comes on like a joke with no punch line. And no punch either--not with hired hands like Charles Drayton and Mickey Curry playing it so safe. Meanwhile, Ian Astbury has quit aping Steven Tyler. Now he apes Tarzan. Welcome to the jungle.
(From Rock & Roll Disc [unpublished 'cause the magazine folded) and the Illinois Entertainer respectively ... )
Richard Marx 
Rush Street
Capitol CDP 7 95874 2
Total disc time: 65:35 (AAD)
Merit: **½
Sound: ****
Buried amid the pointless "hard rock" that dominates this overlong bestseller are three pretty solid pop songs and two chart-topping smashes--the slinky "Keep Coming Back" and the spooky "Hazard"--that deserve every bit of their market share. But for the most part Marx is trying too hard, cramming too many minutes into too many songs and singing them in a strained voice that owes more to Kenny Loggins than it does to any of the vintage rock-and-rollers whose records Marx told Jay Leno he collects.
Richard Marx 
Paid Vacation
(Capitol)
Marx has so refined his mixture of rock, pop, and R&B that only Bryan Adams can boast more homogenized hooks-per-minute. And that's no put-down. Though none of this album's dozen rival Rush Street's "Hazard," only one of them--the fifty-four-second throwaway "Baby Blues"--doesn't draw a bullseye on a ready-made audience. His guest list this time includes Luther Vandross, Lionel Richie, Fee Waybill, and, on the country-tinged "Nothing Left Behind Us," Vince Gill. True, they're subordinated to Marx's over-riding radio-friendly aesthetic, but they also inspire him to up his game with first-rate production and the least histrionic singing of his career.
Still, he does leave himself vulnerable to detractors convinced that he'll never outgrow his wimpiness: "There are too many nonsmokers dying each year as a result of second-hand smoke," he writes in the liner notes. "Demand a smoke-free environment." Next: Rock Against Cholesterol.
(As published in Rock & Roll Disc ... )
PJ Harvey 
Dry
Indigo 162-555-001-2
Total disc time: 40:08 (no SPARS code)
Merit: ***½
Sound: ***½
It's tempting to dismiss Harvey as less than the sum of her influences, among whom she must surely count Patti Smith, Sinead O'Connor, and the Velvet Underground. Where else could a young woman have gone these days to learn the art of welding brutal, scraping guitars to lyrics obsessed with the violence of romance? Yet even on the songs in which she tries too hard and her rhythm section not enough, something's at work--a hook, an image--saving the music from (complete) pretense. And when she gets it just right ("Dress," "Sheela-Na-Gig," "Joe"), she may as well be the future of punk.
(As published in Rock & Roll Disc ...)
Rush 
Roll the Bones
Atlantic 82293-2
Total disc time: 48:06 (DDD)
Merit: ***½
Sound: ***
Unbeknownst to many, Rush spent the '80s streamlining itself. Starting with Permanent Waves, Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart quit blending Yes and Zeppelin and began sounding a lot like the Police. Not that Police fans will admit it. They'll argue that Sting sang more soulfully than Lee and that the Police's bare-bones approach had nothing in common with whatever Rush was was playing. Well, I dare any Police fan to explain the difference between "Synchronicity I," for example, and Roll the Bones' "Dreamline" or "You Bet Your Life"--the same chirpy guitars, the same light-yet-virtuosic drumming, and the same earnest singing about fate's role in the grand drama that is life. Lee no longer sings like a helium-sucking parrot, and at no point does the band condescend to its fans. So why not become one?
(One of my many reviews that went unpublished in Rock & Roll Disc when the magazine ceased publication in 1992 ... )
Todd Rundgren: An Elpee's Worth of Productions 
Rhino R2 70519
Total disc time: 73:22 (AAD)
Merit: **½
Sound: ***
Rhino's knack for creatively repackaging old music fails them a little this time. By chronologically assembling eighteen songs that Todd Rundgren produced for other performers over as many years, the compilers prove merely that when he works with great bands (the New York Dolls, for inastance) he gets great results and that when he works with crap bands (Meat Loaf and the Tubes, for instance) he gets crap--just like any other producer. Of course, there's plenty that falls somewhere in between, and if you program the Bourgeois Tagg, Grand Funk, Fanny, and Lords of the New Church cuts consecutively, you'll brighten your day. But given the inclusion of ho-hum songs from Hunter, Jill Sobule, the Rubinoos, and Rick Derringer, wake-up calls from Hall and Oates' War Babies and Badfinger's Straight Up would've been nice.
(One of my many reviews that went unpublished in Rock & Roll Disc when the magazine ceased publication in 1992 ... )
Marvin 
The Mandolin Man
Restless 7 72582-2
Total disc time: 44:37 (AVD)
Merit: ***½
Sound: ***½
The V in the SPARS code stands for "vinyl," which to Marvin Etzioni (ex-Lone Justice) sounds better than the coated, laser-read plastic of CDs. So what we're really hearing here is a digitally mastered recording of the playing of an LP. And you know what? There's no difference. So these eleven brooding folk songs either stand or fall on their own. When Marvin captures the contrition and the hope that are his main concern, he rivals Leonard Cohen, and both God and man come out looking good. But when he slows down a great pop ballad like "Can't Cry Hard Enough" until it sounds like a dirge and then pitches it out of his range, only T Bone Burnett (whom Marvin sings exactly like) comes out looking good because at least he'd know enough to rock it up a little.
(One of my many reviews that went unpublished in Rock & Roll Disc when the magazine ceased publication in 1992 ... )
Pleasure Thieves 
Simple Escape
Hollywood 60999-2
Total disc time: 49:15 (no SPARS code)
Merit: ***
Sound: ****
This remarkably faithful recreation of mid-'80s Psychedelic Furs has its weak points. Lead vocalist Sinjin overdoes his Richard Butler impersonation, and the lyrics babble themselves into a stupor. But it has strong points too: a real string section, catchy hooks, and what may be the punchiest non R&B horns ever heard on college radio.
(One of my many reviews that went unpublished in Rock & Roll Disc when the magazine ceased publication in 1992 ... )
Britny Fox 
Bite Down Hard
EastWest America 7 91790-2
Total disc time: 41:15 (no SPARS code)
Merit: ***½
Sound: ***½
With new frontman Tommy Paris and his hard-rock shriek replacing old frontman "Dizzy" Dean Davidson and his glam-rock shriek, Britny Fox no longer sound like Slade on steroids. But sounding like Slade on steroids is what made their two CBS discs such dumb fun. Yet the new guy definitely adds more chomp. "Six Guns Loaded" packs a monstrous metal wallop, with "Closer to Your Love" and "Lonely Too Long" close behind. And the ballads, both of them, don't wimp out so much as recall early Boston (the band, not the city).
(One of my many reviews that went unpublished in Rock & Roll Disc when the magazine ceased publication in 1992 ... )
Thompson Twins 
Queer
Warner Bros. 26631-2
Total disc time: 48:03 (AAD)
Merit: ***½
Sound: ****
In 1984 they sounded ethereal. With "Hold Me Now" and "Doctor Doctor" making fans of radio listeners and MTV watchers on both sides of the Atlantic, the Twins successfully toured the continents in support of their multi-platinum Into the Gap, even sellin out the Hammersmith Odeon several nights in a row at one point. Meanwhile, Tom Bailey and Alannah Currie learned that eight-year-old success stories won't buy them another hit in an era of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately. So Queer's "Come Inside," included here in two versions, makes news by making the twelve-inch and club charts although the top forty continues to resist. Too bad, really, since "Flesh and Blood" and "The Saint" capture an iconographic sensuality that, properly promoted, usually sells. And at least half the others bubble along in a pleasnt, psychedelic haze.
(One of my many reviews that went unpublished in Rock & Roll Disc when the magazine ceased publication in 1992 ... )
Poison
Swallow This Live
Capitol CDP 98046-2
Total disc time: 59:39, 55:35 (no SPARS code listed)
Merit: **½
Sound: ***
This live double represents neither Poison's greatest hits (since it omits their greatest hit, "I Won't Forget You") nor their knack for radio-ready concision. Something called "Poor Boy Blues" meanders for eight minutes, while "Drum Solo" and "Guitar Solo" combine for a useless sixteen minutes more. That's twenty-four minutes during which listeners of taste can be forgiven for nodding off. And what will dozers miss besides Bret Michaels' continual announcements to the Florida hordes that their huzzahs are going to end up on a live album? Not much, although "So Tell Me Why," the best of the four studio add-ons, deserves inclusion on a best-of that does justice to the band's glam-metal fusion.
(One of my many reviews that went unpublished in Rock & Roll Disc when the magazine ceased publication in 1992 ... )
Eye & I 
Eye & I
Epic EK 47973
Total disc time: 49:16 (AAD)
Merit: **½
Sound: ***½
Considering that they're graduates of New York's artsy Black Rock Coalition, Eye & I come off surprisingly straight laced. They include occasional hip-hop touches and squalling guitars, but their predominant style is MOR top forty. Nothing wrong with that, but, as their cover of the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs" and their own apocalyptic original "World Without End" confirm, their gift is for loud psychedelia and anything else that will allow them--and vocalist DK Dyson especially--to cut loose.
(One of my many reviews that went unpublished in Rock & Roll Disc when the magazine ceased publication in 1992 ... )
John Waite 
Essential John Waite 1976-1986
Chrysalis F2 21864
Total disc time: 75:23 (AAD)
Merit: ***
Sound: ***½
If this compilation really represented the "essential" John Waite--i.e., his hits with the Babys and Bad English as well as "Missing You"--it would rival Bryan Adams' Waking Up the Neighbours as much in sheer pop quality as it does in length. Alas, none of Waite's Babys or Bad English hits, of which there've only been half-a-dozen or so, are among these twenty tracks, raising truth-in-album-titling issues that "Missing You" and about half the others are, nevertheless, good enough to make you forget.
(One of my many reviews that went unpublished in Rock & Roll Disc when the magazine ceased publication in 1992 ... )
Enya 
Shepherd Moons
Reprise 9 26775-2
Total disc time: 43:33 (no SPARS code)
Merit: ***
Sound: ****½
Yep, she's a New Age chanteuse and therefore something of an airhead. But just when she's about to sing something really stupid, she switches to a Celtic tongue and leaves us commoners none the wiser. Anyway, Enya isn't about words. She's about how to make synthesizers sound like angels. The results aren't rock-and-roll, obviously, but then again you can't rock your baby to sleep to Nirvana.
(One of my many reviews that went unpublished in Rock & Roll Disc when the magazine ceased publication in 1992 ... )
I Shall Be Unreleased: The Songs of Bob Dylan
Rhino R2 70518
Total disc time: 63:55 (AAD)
Merit: **½
Sound: ***½
This disc of various artists covering obscure Dylan songs would've been livelier if Rhino had used Joe Cocker's "Seven days" instead of Ron Wood's, Maria Muldaur's "Ain't No Man Righteous" instead of Jah Malla's, Dave Van Ronk's "All over You" instead of the Raiders', Johnny Cash's San Quentin version of "Wanted Man" instead of the studio one, Eric Clapton's "If I Don't Be There by Morning" instead of his "Walk Out in the Rain," Dylan's Clapton duet on "Sign Language" instead of Dylan's Doug Sahm duet on "Wallflower," and George Harrison's version of "I Don't Want to Do It" from the Porky's Revenge soundtrack instead of almost anything else here. True, Blue Ash's gleeful trashing of "Dusty Old Fairgrounds" and the Staples' "John Brown" smoke, but they're snuffed out by wet blankets from the Hollies, Dion DiMucci, and Pete Seeger.
(One of my many reviews that went unpublished in Rock & Roll Disc when the magazine ceased publication in 1992 ... )Mitsou .JPG)
MitsouHollywood HR-61264-2Total disc time: 37:50 (no SPARS code)Merit: ***Sound: ****To dismiss Mitsou as the Canadian Madonna or Samantha Fox is to miss what makes her special. Her NC-17 videos, for instance, justify more than her love, and her lustrous voice enhances her burnished sexuality instead of the other way around. She sings half these songs in French, but there's no danger of losing the hooks of either the gorgeous slow ones or the randy disco ones in translation. And her transformation of Janis Joplin's "Mercedez Benz" into a pulsating, high-tech critique of materialism is determinedly kinky.
(As published in Rock & Roll Disc ... )
Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe
by Chuck Eddy
Harmony Books, $14
232 pp.
The .jpg)
chief pleasure among the many provided by Chuck Eddy's Stairway to Hell is the language. AC/DC's "This Means War" is an "ultra-compressed boner-dangling semi-'Turd on the Run'-rooted thrashboogie that drags Mick Jagger's Grecian-formulated tail, bleeding blue blood, all across the killing floor." The Godz "plow as if they've got stumps for fingers and write as if they've got stumps for brains, breaking for boogachucka amid dumbass Daltreychord distortion and safari solos that go absolutely nowhere."
It's a language that Eddy's fellow rockcrit at Creem, Richard Riegel, calls "microwaveable Lester Bangs," but you know what happens when you stick mettle as heavy as Lester's in a microwave: You get a ka-boom that sounds like White Light/White Heat (Heavy Metal Album #63), Fun House (#26), Belfegore (#318), and any of seven Motorhead albums (#'s 72, 98, 202, 233, 322, 357, and 364) playing simultaneously and at full volume.
Or maybe not. I've never tried it.
Anyway, Eddy is always a hoot. Other highlights of this, his first book, include two ineffably wise bonus lists ("25 Reasons Disco-Metal Fusion Is Inevitable in the Nineties" and "The 100 Best Heavy Metal Singles Not Available on Any of the 500 Best HM Albums") and such revelations as the following: Miles Davis made better heavy-metal albums than Deep Purple; Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods and the band for whom they used to open, the Osmonds, made better heavy-metal albums than Slayer; and Kiss, Foghat, Flipper, Grand Funk, and Mountain combined made lesser metal than Teena Marie, whose Emerald City features "fuzzers that roar toward internal combustion culminations like Hawkwind helping out Funkadelic" and therefore crash-lands way up at Number Nine on Eddy's list, one spot beneath Rust Never Sleeps, three above (Van Halen's) 1984, and two hundred above Highway to Hell.
And that's not all. Def Leppard (who "mean more to me every day," writes Eddy) and Queen (the "Secret Postmodern Influence of 1989-90") get extolled in all their undeniable magnificence. Art-punks (Sonic Youth especially) get shat upon. The grad-school novels White Noise and A Confederacy of Dunces and an actress who bared her twin peaks in Playboy (Sherilyn Fenn) get linked to Thurston Moore, Mountain, and Suzi Quatro respectively. And as King's X outnumbers King Diamond here two albums to zero, God gets proven more metallic than Satan.
We also learn that although Eddy is only 5'5", he isn't wild about Ronnie James Dio, and that although he's heterosexual, he digs Accept's Balls to the Wall. But back to the Osmonds: If you think they're not heavy metal, tell me why their Crazy Horses LP is the only album here whose entry number is marred by a typo and why that typo transforms the numeral 66 into--Mormons had better sit down--66.6!
The critical reader, however, will demand explanations for the following: How can Eddy think there is a noun, real is an adverb, and like is a subordinating conjunction when he's smart enough to observe that Guns N' Roses' "One in a Million" is "a lot like Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing--same fear of foreigners, same local color, same ability to stir things up"? How can he list Queen's barely metallic News of the World and not the much heavier Greatest Hits, Jazz, The Works, or even Live Killers? And how can he praise In the Court of the Crimson King (HM Album #460) by King Crimson and ignore the strikingly similar Emerson, .jpg)
Lake and Palmer, whose Pictures at an Exhibition Lester Bangs once accurately described as a "fullblown slashing, crashing, urping, burping, electronic freak-out ... not only a reprise of Whizz! and Whirr!, but also Boink!, Grrr!, Skizzrrll!, feedback and applause falling together like the walls of the Red Sea after Moses' troops tramped through"? And exactly what are Eddy's credentials? Well, he has admitted that Harmony paid him $10,000 to write the book, and if he got paid in coin, that's some heavy metal indeed.
But enough chitter-chatter, chitter-chatter 'bout schmatter, schmatter, schmatter. You want to know what HM Album #1 is right? Hint: "It's got finesse and weirdness and newness and noise and funk, it makes you sweat and makes you groove, it's the same as sex, it stops time and history and seems to last for hours, it's what the blues could never be."
For more information buy the book. Microwave not included.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
The Atlantic Years (2 CDs)
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