"People say that I am crazy, people say that I am strange/ I don't care about what people say, they can't see inside my brain." That's Talking Heads' David Byrne singing on this, his second solo album. He's right—he is crazy and strange. But this record isn't too crazy or strange at all, which could be part of the problem.
During the last few years, Byrne has become obsessed with Afro-Latin music. It culminated in the 1989 Brazil Classics albums he compiled and in his solo debut, Rei Momo (1989). Uh-Oh finds him taking a cautious sideways step to accommodate his art-pop roots with his new influences.
Such a ploy works well on a track like "Monkey Man," which combines a heady cocktail of percussion fidgeting around a thumping brass section, spiky guitar and a wailing female chorus. And "A Walk in the Dark" is a fine enough piece of creepy, noir-ish drama. But elsewhere the ideas and execution are just too lightweight ("Girls on My Mind") or too complicated ("A Million Miles Away"). Often the fine playing overshadows (or completely overruns) a thin idea for a song, as it does in "Hanging Upside Down," a snappy number with great swinging brass about looking at girls in the shopping mall.
Maybe we expect too much of David Byrne these days. After all, each Talking Heads album used to serve as a signpost that other bands would heed for future direction. Maybe now that he has painted his masterpieces, author-director-musician Byrne should be allowed to graze and doodle wherever he likes. The 12 songs on this album are pretty landscapes, but don't expect the shock of the new. (Luaka Bop/Warner Bros.)
k.d. lang
If we're going to get all français about it, ennuyeuse ("boring") might be more apt. This album, a monument to affectation in many ways (mostly lang's histrionic attempts to wring some emotion out of pallid lyrics and melodies), is ultimately undone by the relentlessly uninteresting set of 10 songs chosen by lang and her coproducers, Ben Mink and Greg Penny.
It's not just the incessant "la la las" of "Season of Hollow Soul." The lang-Mink tune, "The Mind of Love," after struggling past the opening lines, "Talking to myself/ Causing great concern for my health," bogs down in seven repetitions of "Where is your head, Kathryn?" (Kathryn being lang's first name). Mink, lang and Penny committed all the composing on the album, and it's all in the same collapsed vein—"Wash Me Clean" begins, "You swim/ Swim through my veins/ Drown me/ in your reign."
The musical setting for all the misbegotten lyrics tends to suggest justifiably forgotten '60s folky styles, with plinky guitars and quaint accordion fills giving lang little to lean on.
But then the massed Modern Jazz Quartet, New York Philharmonic and R.E.M. couldn't have propped up such tracks as the sing-songy "Miss Chatelaine": "Every time your eyes meet mine/ Clouds of qualm/ burst into sunshine."
Next time Ben and Greg come by peddling song ideas, k.d. bar the door. (Sire/Warner Bros.)
Fourplay
Tasteful, smooth, sleek, slick...it's a slippery slope you get onto trying to describe music as polished and polite and syrupy and somnolent and sanitized as this chart-topping, mind-numbing jazz-rock.
The four perpetrators—pianist Bob James, guitarist Lee Ritenour, bassist Nathan East and drummer Harvey Mason—are all heavily decorated recording studio veterans: gold and platinum albums, Grammy nominations (and a few Grammys), assorted accolades and a sterling list of stars whose albums they've produced or played on. They describe Fourplay in ambitious terms. "It's always been a fantasy to form a cooperative group where there was no leader ... all voices were equal," says James. Ritenour elaborates: "Bob's original idea was a performance quartet, a la, maybe even, the Modern Jazz Quartet of the '50s revisited in the '90s..."
Dream on. This, unfortunately, is elevator music, as safe and slight as it is nominally adroit and tokenly eclectic (some sparkly jazz-funk in "Max-0-Man,"a little training-wheels reverie in "Quadrille"). It's pretty and (here's that slippery slope again) precious and passionless. This Fourplay is unconsummated. (Warner Bros.)
Jean-Paul Bourelly
It takes a while to hear Bourelly for who he is, because when he first straps on a guitar and, even more, starts singing, it's hard to think of anyone but Jimi Hendrix.
He's got the wild, funky energy of Hendrix—the searing intensity on guitar and the floating, insinuating sexiness on vocals. "Garden of Love," "Supernatural," "Stranger" and the title cut all make you wonder if you're witnessing the second coming. Yet on these and the seven other pieces, there's a forward spin to the rhythms and harmonies that dispels any notion that the 31-year-old Chicago native is just a hippie-dippie (or, to use his phrase from "Trippin'," "freaky-deaky ") throwback.
Bourelly, it turns out, is a state-of-the-art guitarist who has absorbed as much from the skewed and fractured jazz-funk of James Blood Ulmer and the stabbing lines of Muddy Waters as from the man who spun "Castles Made of Sand." Bourelly evades pigeonholing. He has played jazz with Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones and funk of various kinds with Bell Biv DeVoe, D-Nice and Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince.
If in his solos he occasionally falls back on '60s rock clichés, he's repeatedly saved by the variety of his own compositions and sound textures and by the snapping-swiveling virtuosity of the bass-and-drum duos with whom he recorded: Reggie Washington with Tony Lewis, "F-Nation" Freddie Cash with Rodney Holmes, and Kevin Bruce Harris with Kevin "K-Dog" Johnson. Like Hendrix, who had Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell churning under his wings, Bourelly knows that without an ace rhythm section, a guitar hero simply can't take off. (Enemy)
- Contributors:
- Barry Divola,
- Ralph Novak,
- Eric Levin.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
