U2's Latest Piece of Shit; A Kick-Ass Tribute to Rap-Metal Heroes Snot; P.J. Harvey; J Mascis & the Fog
U2 aren't pretentious. Oh no. During a performance of the raucous, wannabe-young single "Elevation" on Top of the Pops, Bono leaned forward halfway through and took an avaricious bite out of the arm of a starstruck teenage girl, separated from the herd, alone at the front. (A stooge, one assumes.) The song itself isn't a bad approximation of Blur trying to approximate the energy of a band 10 years younger?"Song 2," say, or any other melody that borrows heavily from Steve Malkmus. The action, I suppose, was meant to make us realize how hungry U2 are, even after 20 years in the business. Instead it made me wonder at the colossal arrogance of the man. Perhaps the girl didn't want his slobbery, 40-year-old teeth in her flesh?
It reminds me of a story a photographer friend used to tell: while he was shooting U2 for a UK music paper a few years ago, Bono came over to where he was standing and, lifting the photographer's hand from his camera, placed it on his leather-clad crotch. The action was simultaneously beamed across the arena on massive video screens. Yeah, we get it. The symbiotic relationship between artist and grasping media. The way Bono prostitutes himself and his art for all of our benefits every time he clambers onto the stage and stands there preening himself in those ridiculous wraparound shades and that overblown, high-pitched voice.
Fuck that. My friend is as much an individual, an artist, as Bono. He should have sued him for mental anguish and sexual harassment, as should have the girl on Top of the Pops. They didn't ask for Bono's inadequacies to be placed upon them.
Here's what the new U2 album is like: all the others. It mentions Jesus Christ, the wind, love, New York and beauty. The guitars sound like those that have belonged to the Edge for some time now, and there's enough sumptuous production and soaring strings and Eno synthesizers to please any hardcore fans still a little confused by Zoo TV. U2 have hit 40, so it must be time to consolidate their core appeal; hence "Walk On" and "Beautiful Day," two songs that could have appeared in 1985, let alone '95. Yes, U2 still deal with the big picture, those vast, almost expressionless sweeps of emotion where nothing else matters except for The Big Sky and Love shouted in BLOCK CAPITAL LETTERS. "I'm not afraid to die/I'm not afraid to live," Bono wails in his one histrionic style, while the Brian Eno/Daniel Lanois-produced song chugs easily enough along. You need insights into human nature? U2 have 'em!
There's even a song, not on the American release, written by mewling, whining novelist Salman Rushdie, the laidback "The Ground Beneath Her Feet." (U2 pretentious? Perish the thought!) He has to do something while living it up and costing the UK taxpayers however many bloody pounds per hour. You do wonder why U2 bothered asking him when you read the lyrics, though. "All my life, I worshipped her/Her golden voice, her beauty's beat/How she made us feel/How she made us real/And the ground beneath her feet."
"Peace on Earth" is a preachy saccharine-fest to rival even John Lennon's appalling "Imagine" for nausea. Speaking of whom? Anyone else spot Bono's neat, chameleonlike ability to switch from imitating Lennon to Bowie (circa "China Girl") in the space of one song? Here, it's on the plodding "In a Little While."
I suppose in an age where mediocre, sub-Thrill Jockey albums entitled Kid A are praised simply because they come from million-selling artists, we should be grateful that their tutors still believe enough in the healing and unifying power of rock music that they can produce overblown tripe like this. Even after all these years.
Yeah. Thanks, chaps.
Everett True
Here's how it works: the surviving members of Snot, an L.A. rap metal quartet, didn't want to scrap the (damn good) songs that they had for their second record. So they made some calls and got a staggering lineup of frontmen?including Fred Durst and Jonathan Davis?to make a sort of Snot/tribute-to-Snot album. Snot's songs, with each vocalist bringing his own lyrics, and the whole thing steeped in "R.I.P James Lynn Strait" sentiment. It could work, right?
It does. As soon as I got Strait Up, I skipped to track 13?where the producers buried an actual Snot song?to see whether this band deserves a posthumous CD. Yeah, they do. Snot sounds like Nirvana doing rap metal, and they would've been huge. "Absent" opens with drums and big chords, then leads a light verse (reminding me of that aforementioned DOA, Brad Nowell) into a pummeling chorus. The band even manages to end the song just like Korn's "Got the Life." As for Strait, he is (whoops, was) a capable, if not spectacular, nu metal dude. He screamed with conviction; he did the quiet parts okay; he could have developed a distinctive style if given the time.
It's the rest of the album?9 tunes intended for Snot's second record?that shows the band's real strengths: guitarist Mikey Doling and bassist John "Tumor" Fahenstock. These two write good 90s metal; they know how to throw in funk, straight-up riffs and the occasional melody to get their point across. They don't leave a dud on the album, and that's quite an accomplishment, given what some of their singers do.
Mark McGrath, for starters, should be nowhere near Strait Up?he should be all around the world, where statues crumble for him. On "Reaching Out," not even grating vocal effects and a bunch of other singers can salvage his shitty performance. Jonathan Davis is almost as bad, recycling the antics on "Take It Back" that kept him fat and happy for the last two Korn records. And M.C.U.D. of (hed)P.E. pulls off a whitey triple threat: he manages to ape Fred Durst, Jon Davis and Eminem all on one track ("I Know Where You're At").
That's the worst of it, though. The rest is pounding, with some terrific moments, like Brandon Boyd of Incubus singing the hell out of "Divided (An Argument for the Soul)." He has effects on his voice, which is too bad?Boyd is a pro and doesn't need them. He also has a great melody, courtesy of Mikey Doling and Tumor Fahenstock, who knew how to distribute their songs.
Serj Tankian from System of a Down tackles the opener, "Starlit Eyes," without his usual Armenian nuttiness. He's holding back, and that's appropriate for the tune, which owes a lot to Korn's "Blind" and System's own "Peephole." Lajon Witherspoon of Sevendust shows amazing range on the all-out country ballad "Angel's Son." I had no idea he could sing like that.
Finally, Fred Durst is remarkably low-key. He does track nine, and he's listed fourth on the front of the CD. Maybe he laid off promo because he knew he had the record's best song?"Forever" is a jewel. It opens with drums, a guitar lick stolen directly from the corpse of Rage Against the Machine, and Fred himself, with Madison Square Garden delay on his voice, yelling "Dedication! To Lynn! (Lynn!)" For the next three minutes, Durst tosses pissed-off chipmunk hooks ("Step the fuck back!," "Oh you like that, don'chya?," "Every second you're alive is just a countdown") to his heart's content. "Forever" doesn't even need a chorus, but we get this couplet from Fred: "You don't know what you got until it's gone/And you don't know what you lost until it's gone." Perfect.
Strait Up comes with a massive booklet, full of photos (including the one you all wanted to see?Lynn getting head on Limp Bizkit's giant toilet at Ozzfest '98). Unfortunately, this booklet also has lyrics. They're atrocious, across the board, too bad to print. I'm sure that Lynn would rather have had the talented people on his CD write real songs instead of "Lynn Strait '68-'98" pap. But that's a minor gripe. Lyrics aren't important in nu metal, and no number of cheap rhymes can derail Strait Up's status as the best hard rock compilation since the Crow soundtrack.
Ned Vizzini
It's the way Ventresco lives that makes him authentic. With his guitar sack on his back, he'll blow into some hick-ass town for one of these revivalist festivals, where 95 percent of the audience isn't even in on the joke, but are more spectators for some kinda historical preservation society crap instead of an actual writhing life-force. Ventresco hates these kind of academics and tells them so every chance he gets, which has resulted in his being fired from one lucrative gig after another. For instance, he was playing with Lavay Smith and her Skillet Lickers or whatever they're called?don't know the woman, all I know is that I've seen her Bettie Page/Betty Boop profile in magazine after magazine, while Ventresco meanwhile is eating spaghetti out of a can. Apparently, it was Ventresco who turned her on to the blues jive, but a money dispute severed the relationship. So there's some bitterness there. You want conflict? Ry Cooder was going to write the liner notes for this CD. That was the record company's idea. But the minute Ventresco heard about it he let loose with the "I hate Ry Cooder, he's a damn idiot," etc.
Still, the little curio label wanted the big-name liner notes. Told he had to deliver at least one original track, for copyright purposes, Ventresco served up an ode entitled "I Hate Ry Cooder." The label talked him out of it, and Cooder got the ax. In the end, Barry "Dr. Demento" Hansen wrote the notes, which was a much wiser choice, since he's one of the few who could appreciate the depths of Ventresco's obscurist blues knowledge.
Most of the songs here date back to before your grandma's age, and Ventresco found out about them by obtaining the original 78s in thrift stores. His commitment to this stuff is admirable; in a way, it's the same kind of proselytizing fervor that fired Clapton and the original Rolling Stones, only Ventresco goes back further into the canon with such songs as Scott Joplin's "Sunflower Slow Drag" and Charles L. Johnson's "Tobasco-Rag Waltz." His wrangling of these is pure and full of spirit; using a combination of fingerpicking and open chording, Ventresco proves himself a gifted instrumentalist who could have his hand at any genre. The only original on the album, "Shadow Blues," is a country-ish slap-around that brings to mind someone like Lightnin' Hopkins.
Ventresco's relationship with his instrument is an intimate and personal one, and he seldom betrays his own gift by playing wank for wank's sake, like some of those other acoustical Joes (the aforementioned Cooder comes to mind). With any luck he could be the next Leo Kottke, but something tells me that's not what he's really shooting for. It's hard to turn off the 20th century, not to mention the 21st one, but Ventresco has achieved the amazing feat of being a self-styled "relic" of an age that might not have ever existed in the first place. Here's to preserving its (perhaps mythical) luster.
Joe S. Harrington
Elsewhere the album is a return to the stripped-back production of 1993's Rid of Me, and also the same record's Patti Smith infatuation. There's even a song called "Horses in My Dreams," on which Polly sings about seeing "Horses in my dreams/Like waves, from the sea"?as opposed to Patti, who sang about horses in her dreams, a little like waves from the sea. Two album titles in there, too! Nice one, Polly. Hmm. There's nothing wrong with a good honest tribute, I guess. Except that Patti used to sound much more vital?as did Polly herself. Clearly the state-of-the-art production Flood came up with for 1998's Is This Desire? made Polly sound too much like a Bjork or an Alanis even for her. Time to retreat, into the past. Trouble is, there's never a Steve Albini around when you need one.
Ah, who needs him?not when Polly, with fellow musicians Mick Harvey and original drummer Rob Ellis, can produce themselves. Sort of. Stories is Polly's New York album. She spent six months there, and if that's not an artistic "experience," then what is? Great. That's all we bloody need: another New York album. Not only that, but it uses old-school hackneyed imagery as Polly informs us of her overwhelming love for Times Square and the Brooklyn Bridge (the Staten Island Ferry, too, presumably). In "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore" she sings about?ah, you guessed it. On the appalling, trite holiday snaps song "You Said Something," she mentions rooftops in Brooklyn, the Empire State Bldg. and "five bridges." Phew! I never realized that New York had so much to offer. There's even a guest vocal or two from Millennium Man Thom Yorke. In a neat twist here, the male sings the female's words? D'ya think Polly would've asked Thom if he wasn't so hip? "Can you hear them?" her proxy voice Yorke asks in his irritatingly overdone falsetto on another Big Apple love song, "This Mess We're In." "The helicopters? We're in New York now." To make sure we understand these are Polly's words that The Famous Undernourished One is singing, Polly speaks/repeats them under his strangely emotionless voice.
Well, whoop-di-do. Polly Harvey has discovered Manhattan. It's big, it's overwhelming and it has stunning views. Polly Harvey has finally withdrawn her emotional self from the fray, perhaps mindful of the need to maintain a career. So, of course, the critics are falling over themselves to proclaim this her "most accomplished work" to date. Don't believe them.
Everett True
First, Shields contributed a searing guitar solo to 1999's pivotal "If They Move?Kill Them" track on Primal Scream's rather engaging XTRMNTR. Indeed, he played a whole Australian tour with Gillespie's gang, shattering spotlights while all around him continued to live out their fantasies of being in the Rolling Stones circa 1971. (If ever a band should've been strangled at birth?) Now the hefty, laconic Englishman has turned up on J Mascis' first solo album since the split of Dinosaur Jr. The result is like having front-row seats at a present-day postmodernist version of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd's guitar pyrotechnics in Television. More Light is that good.
I once wrote that J Mascis plays guitar like he skis?recklessly, but fully in control. That control and effortless grace is in ample evidence here. Listen to the easy, shimmering beauty of "Ground Me to You" or "Where'd You Go." Not even Neil Young does Neil Young as well as J when he puts his mind to it. "Waistin'," meanwhile, is as casual and beautiful a slacker anthem?I'm using the word as it was once meant, before it lost all resonance and became another lifestyle accessory?as even "Freak Scene" or "The Wagon." I am not exaggerating. It seemed that somewhere along the line, J lost interest in what Dinosaur Jr. were shaping up to be. Praise didn't help him: he obviously thought critics stupid when they started printing headlines like "J MASCIS IS GOD" on the front of Spin. So the drive became subsumed.
It was always easy to mistake J's natural reticence and good humor for laziness?and perhaps something got confused along the line?but at their height, Dinosaur Jr. had a passion and pyrotechnic splendor that very few bands could hope to match. I have listened to the 11 songs here?especially "All the Girls"?about 20 times now. Here is my conclusion: this is the finest album J has made since he last played with Lou Barlow. He has rediscovered his inner fire.
Everett True