Stream two of Jojo's
mp3 songs! Click here!
(Music Album Reviews)
IN 1997, Jojo also wrote album reviews designed for The Manila Times and Today that -- except for the one on Filter -- did not see print for various reasons.
The first record reviews he did saw print way back in the late '80s in Jingle Chordbook Magazine -- they included one on Madonna's Like A Virgin and one on an album by Orchestral Maneouvres In The Dark. His copies of the rag with those reviews remain in limbo, so he can only show us his record reviewing in the year 1997, involving bands like Alice In Chains and The Fugees. He followed the Rolling Stone one-to-five stars rating system. Here are those reviews:
IMAGE IN CHAINS
(or, Levity in Black)
* * * * 1/2
ALICE IN CHAINS/Alice In Chains (Columbia/Sony Music Entertainment Philippines)
Seattle's Sub Pop Records mistook them for glamour metal rockers, calling them Kindergarden (after the Seattle metal band Soundgarden), perhaps due to their name which conjures images of Alice Cooper androgyny and metal pseudo-perversions. Sub Pop has been proven wrong after Dirt (1992), yet Alice in Chains continue to display latently comic salt-of-the-earth passions within human weaknesses. As through the cover illustration of the present self-titled third album (the album chains the band back together again after a 1994 split, that split caused mainly by singer Layne Staley's rehab hardheadedness with his heroin addiction).
Yet this display, manifest through that and other illustrations on the sleeve and through Staley's and guitarist Jerry Cantrell's offhanded lyrics writing, only makes them more misunderstood. Critics continue to rant about Alice's obsession with the macabre, the weird, the black, overlooking the frivolity and even hopefulness. The comparison between the three-legged dog and the three-legged man on the sleeve as almost a Marxist kind of joke escapes the critics. Insisting that Grind, the opening cut and first hit single from the album, is a disclaimer to the threat of Staley's addiction (remembering Kurt Cobain's and Blind Melon's Shannon Hoon's departures by heroin's way), they forget that it was written by Cantrell. Cantrell, the band's apparent leader, has always been obsessed with mortality but has also consistently displayed sarcasm towards the stupidity of some people in the rock media. For although Grind can point to Staley's state (Cantrell wrote the song in the breakup's duration), the song could also be a shot at rock prophets who've been announcing the death of Seattle acts, and at writers who freely expand on Alice's interview statements. What else for is the threat of violent retaliation in the song and the title?
And as the rock magazines noted how the second cut Brush Away is about the many ways critics view Alice's art ("A joke? Or latest craze?"), they forget to jot down that the junkie Staley wrote the lyrics. Certainly the first two songs touch on the Staley condition, yet it must not be ignored how Alice uses that as a metaphor for the group's continuing presence vis a vis the plasticity of rock's labelers' and trendmakers' cries of doom.
Then, even as Staley sings about his problem in Sludge Factory, he mentions an "endless corporate ignorance" (though he acknowledges its concern and help). Of this ignorance he sings, "20 hours won't print my picture milk carton size" and "Call me up, congratulations, ain't the real why/ There's no pressure besides brilliance,/ Let's say by day 9." Of the concern he croons, "(It) lets me control time/ By the way, by the way, by the way, by the way" and "So afraid, you kindly gurgle out a date for me." The dual concern of the song melds in the multiple mumbles at the end which further castigate The Corporation as of "liars, thieves," beaten when their "weapon is killed." Well, it's the typical way truly thankful men thank their kind fellows -- and I'm not kidding.
The whole mythology of success is pursued in Heaven Beside You (the current hit), which Cantrell wrote for himself, being about the breakup with his girlfriend of seven years; now, though it refers to his inability to remain faithful, it could very well be about Staley's addiction too! -- "Heaven beside you,/ Hell within." The last lines are, however, hopeful.
In Staley's Head Creeps, we double-read a desire to die and a desire to be freed from this pain to be able to hit back at the mouths, the tongues. Staley's words on Again closes Side A, coming out like a junkie's advising, say, an alcoholic to go through treatment, in the process introducing a "her" into the picture -- the way Shannon Hoon's baby daughter's emergence became an inspiration for Hoon's rehab (the rehab's failure notwithstanding). (Note: on the lyrics jacket, Again's words can be read over a color photo of flowers following the picture of death under Head Creeps).
Rolling Stone's Jon Wiederhorn is right in saying Alice is "more indicative of a cry for help than of a true desire to spiral into the void." We hear this cry in Shame in You, even as it is an advice to fans to avoid getting hooked. We hear it in God Am, after a pre-intro flicking of lighters, when Staley sings "Dear God, how have you been, then/ I'm not fine, fuck pretending/ All of this death you're sending/ Best throw some free heart mending// Invite you in my heart, then/ When done, my sins forgiven?/ This God of mine relaxes,/ World dies, I still pay taxes." Despite the latent swearing, really still a prayer.
Frogs points to innocence as the culprit in the Staley drug problem, and self-consciously plays with "Expiration date/ Fate ... I'm great" almost sarcastically. Sarcasm is clearly in the funereal trumpets prior to the last song Over Now. Cantrell sums up the swipe at media here, in telling us how Alice's image in chains can still "breathe somehow" -- i.e., despite the press' imagining them without the fourth leg, Staley. Cantrell asks writers, reporters, and his bandmates, "Could you stand right here/ Look me straight in the eye and say/ That it's over now?"
Granted. The record is an artistic triumph. But one reason Spin magazine couldn't be taken in by the levity in the songs was the same reason Rolling Stone ran a frightened cover article on the band in February, the RS writer noticing in the interview Staley's increasing vein punctures. (JSV)
WOUNDED POETS
Two albums depict a nightclub of the soul
* * * * 1/2
EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL/Walking Wounded (Atlantic-EMI/OctoArts EMI)
Boldness is now the operative word for this erstwhile bossa nova-driven duo. Or is the present experiment with drumbeats so brave after the chart success of the Todd Terry remix of "Missing" in '95?
Let's go beyond marketing concerns. Trance, the word, is operative. There's the listless vocalizings of Ms. Tracey Thorn, and now here is the frantic-beat atmospherics of British jungle (drum 'n' bass!).
The '96 hit from the collection is a straightforward-yet-subtle adulterer's confession, in its own psychological fashion filled with heartfelt regret, yet beaming with the sublime excitement (in the pseudo-African fashion, beating on a mating drum?) of EBTG's early British hit "Driving". There's the Andy Bradfield mix and there's the Todd Terry (again) remix of "Wrong", both right. Compare the two constructions, but like comparing two car models in the same journey. And like "Missing", "Wrong" argues that disco dancing is as full of sorrows and guilt-feelings as it is of pumping, rolling eagerness.
Walking Wounded seems to EBTG to be a logical eighth album, following last year's tensive (lyrics-wise, at least) Amplified Heart and the previous row of relatively-fine-love-state song collections. But EBTG seem to have always been fascinated with distance, space, airport departures, car or train travel, etc., that it's not a surprise to see this present non-surge (to me) in EBTG's story to include near-final physical separation, risky reconciliation by phone, the nocturnal spaces of loneliness. EBTG have likewise been fascinated by the god Silence that when the angel Jungle arrived they just had to grab it, wings that could fly and everything.
And so here, in what could be their ultimate thesis album, EBTG stretch their favorite subject to an extreme situation and loci, a near-entropic psychological forest of love and life.
Thanks to jungle, they could shoot this for a darker, more tension-rich widescreen drama creating a film noir of the heart. Starring Thorn of course, the dialogue care of the alternating texts by her and Ben Watt.
Walking Wounded's lyrics progress in self-contradictory, undecided, shifting logic. Creating on the whole a Buddhist poetry-like puzzle that -- the way the restless beats over nervous quiet find solace in regularity -- finally sees light in the end's effect of real stillness.
* * * * 1/2
IMPERIAL TEEN/Seasick (Slash/PolyCosmic)
After the sound check, combine the leer of Nirvana with the sonic output of pseudo-dumb Green Day, faggoty Smashing Pumpkins, chorusy Foo Fighters, sardonic Violent Femmes, even playful B-52s. Color the stage teenage candy blue and yellow, with a rose pink and a purple stripe! Provide a Walt Disney-esque picture or video of a smiling Flipper. Sum: you'll get Imperial Teen's formula for letting you in on the dolphin's crying teeth.
If that's confusing, let's put it all this way. First, paint a picture representing teenage America. Paint that through sounds. Through rock sounds: a Brian Wilson here, a funny Yoko Ono-parody there, finally commercial grunge all over. Put happy melodies, cheerful choruses, teenage language.
Then under it all, refer symbolically, allusionistically, directly, to the bitter truth of post-Alice In Chains, post-Pumpkins teenage situations (and post-scrunge teenage pretensions). Don't do it the Cake way, confronting the empire of royal American teens (and music for teens) head-on. Do it from within, as it were, preferably the lyrics talking about "I, teenage" or "I, rock star" instead of "you, stupid". Except that Imperial Teen would use all three persons in a song to refer to one individual teenage specimen (wonder why; anyone?).
Spread the palette to pay tribute to all losers, including the much-feared fag in "Butch", doing Evan Dando's sympathy ditty one better. Pay heed to death ("I'm up to my neck in party favors, pesticides and pills"), then twist McLuhan to become Foucault cum Jung ("our subtext is our plot") -- all this you can do while retaining the constant pity-you-but-go-to-hell take on today's teenage psyche and curse.
Sure, Roddy Bottum (long Courtney Love's confidant) presents a homoerotic sitcom on King Kurt (in "Butch" -- "the prince wants to be a queen" -- and in all the songs), but if you can't get the joke (even on Will Schwartz's baby vocals), you can't see how serious it all is here. Because in IT's language, certain forms of pathos are enveloped by, and sealed in, all that sweetness. "I have a crate that's filled with bricks and pictures of our past./Depreciating values and I'm losing interest fast.../I would rather stand and die than have to live in nil" ("Balloons"), to music that bugaloos. (JSV)
GHOST IN THE MACHINE
* * *
FILTER/Short Bus (Reprise/Warner Music Philippines)
The album's title refers to a mode of American transportation for "developmentally-challenged" students, probably with a desire to sound witty above the songs' rancorous, cynical, sometimes suicidal outside stance. The band's name could simply allude to the Macintosh machine the band's Richard Patrick and Brian Liesegang are so crazy about.
The album title did offend some Americans in its associating the DC students with the outsider, but it could simply have been an attempt at irony in regards the Mac. A statement on the sleeve goes: "(There is a certain subset of musicians who) adhere to the false premise that 'electronic' music or the tools involved imply a lack of creativity or inspired performance. Technology in the hands of creative, intelligent individuals is a tool for art, not a hindrance. (Being members of a race placed in the current century, Filter) admit freely to the use of such devices."
Rash claims? Let's look at the "creative, intelligent" individuals' use -- "for art" -- of these devices. Let's not kid ourselves, Filter are just cutting down Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails' musical ideas to a fixed page. This is typical "scrunge," i.e. fraudulent grunge or "corporate alternative." The novelty, however, is that the whole Filter outing was not manufactured by corporate talent-hunters (mostly marketing geniuses who look for soundalikes) but by the band's honest curiosity for new sounds-assembling.
Patrick and Liesegang have proved to the world how we don't need producers to come up with a band record anymore. We now only require the presence of a Mac with the Studiovision Pro software to produce it ourselves, thus leaving to the record company just the simple, final job of mixing. Could this be the reason why British guitar-punk turned master techno-dub DJ, Moby, picked Short Bus as one of his ten favorite albums from late '95? Or why Rolling Stone readers voted Filter one of 1995's five best new bands?
Using everything from feedback to bird calls, Filter patch them through the computer and loop and rearrange everything inside the hard disk. Surely, a simple guitar sound can arrive at various other weird harmonies. But whereas '80s musicians and producers would use Electronics to flaunt Electronics, Filter want it for "organic" ends. The electronics is not the music but the cheap tool for emotional aims. So that had those "subset of musicians" mentioned above not existed, Filter might not have displayed the sleeve statement. Because we don't have to know (do we?) that the hissing, crackling noise behind the guitars in "Stuck in Here" comes from a broken toilet, processed in the Mac.
Could it be that Filter know, like marketing gurus, how scrunge angst still sells and how middle-class new wave electronics still stinks in the marketplace? Assuming that's in the plan -- with songs like the successful hit "Hey Man, Nice Shot" (for Kurt Cobain), "Dose" (a cynical shot at preachers), and the typical songs of hopelessness -- it is promising enough to see this band interested in anything other than the increasing cliches of this musical film noir called grunge. (JSV)
ABOVE PARTISANSHIP
* * * * 1/2
FUGEES/The Score (Ruffhouse-Columbia/Sony Music Philippines)
Gangsta rap's supposed virtue is in the presentation of a cathartic landscape of near-ludicrous violence which presumes everybody in an American ghetto to have knowledge of as pure play-around. Bull. What does it achieve, really?
The Fugees (Haitian-Americans Wyclef and Pras and one-time Sister Act 2 support Lauryn Hill) look at that presumption straight in the face, quickly positing their answer to it by moving into the "humanization of hip-hop". What do they achieve? Under resonating melodies, the Fugees -- in what could be mistaken as a parody of gangsta rap were it not for the sincerity in the undertow -- offer sermons that involve necessary alternative angles for the American ghetto situation. E.g. Rastafarianism, Christianity, humanity, life, beauty, urban pastorals, and "white" humor, all bobbing in the lines. The Fugees shake their heads at the black artist's pathos-image of the doomed black man. What turns their rap songs into believable anthems for both blacks and whites? Such self-criticisms that come from within the 'hood (speaking the same language Snoop Doggy Dogg dangles) instead of from the white-without, or even the "well-raised" black-without of Bill Cosby, can't be ignored these days.
Sure, the average American black man/woman is truly a refugee in his/her own country. But is it possible that most of the time we're all complaining refugees hiding within our own sleeping potentials? Not to be bourgeois or Republican, however, the Fugees look at all magnificently from above the confines of partisanship, a la Pras' and Wyclef's fellow-West-Indian, the poet Derek Walcott, even spreading wings to include reggae, middle-class R & B, instrument-music, Spanish guitars, and whatever geography black refugees can visit on the machine, in their music for celebrating life (not the glamor of death). (JSV)
AMOS AGENDA
* * * * 1/2
TORI AMOS/Boys for Pele (EastWest/Warner Music Philippines)
Thank the lyrics sheet because Amos' diction, both with the words and with the music for these words, can get strange. This strangeness, however, displays its full value when she begins to lure listeners into her word/music-world of ancient mythology (Pele is the Hawaiian volcano goddess), personal history/memory (her recent separation likely included), and fantasy, fitting these imageries into issues that concern the present. Her present and ours.
In this third album, Amos has perfected her preferred word-craft involving the elusive (actually, the vague that threaten to be not at all). In one of the most ambiguous songs, the single line "I need a big loan from the girl zone" can go two ways in enriching the song -- the Lesbos way and the heterosexual erotica way of looking at it, which difference alone can make the entire hymn constantly different from itself. Could "Not The Red Baron" also be a song about AIDS victims as well as about abortion babies? In what Umberto Eco would probably refer to as the songs with more or less "closed texts", ambiguity still bobs in more lines than a few. In "Hey Jupiter", Amos is aware of the crucial play in the line "so are you gay, are you blue" -- tickling both our suspiciousness and then our linguistic fairness.
Musically, meanwhile, Amos confronts those who've accused her of being a constant soundalike of many a former star. But instead of stamping her own trademark wail or vocal whimper, she "samples" throats from everywhere, from (I'm guessing) Joni Mitchell's to PJ Harvey's, to Barbra Streisand's, Carly Simon's, certain female country singers', even perhaps Courtney Love's. I am not surprised by the subtle snippets here of dubbed sfx's (a bow to British jungle music?). Finally, to complement this expansion of range, she hauls onstage a harpsichord, a choir somewhere, beats untried, forms new to her audience, and strange sounds -- all carefully laid for the vivid, rich, expansive and expanding Amos agenda. (JSV)
A COLLECTIVE RAGE
* * * * 1/2
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE/Evil Empire (Epic/Sony Music Philippines)
America is able to tolerate Rage's extreme leftism only because it is primarily aimed at either the Mexican or the Peruvian government. An American record company even capitalized on it, ultimately selling it for more capital.
Examples of this leftism. "People Of The Sun" rallies for the Zapatistas at Chiapas (or the Chicanos in California?) to take up arms. "Bulls On Parade," a big hit in '96, contributes an accessible sonic shout for the anti-Pentagon militarist information campaign. "Vietnow" kicks the Church and Washington as the evil detonators of bomb-the-dumbos pro-government Managuan AM radio programs. Then echoing the sentiments of the line "They rally round the family" in "Bulls On Parade," "Revolver" castigates the values of pugilism in a feminist mode. "Snakecharmer" shoots the selfishness (what a poor word) of puppet-politicians. All these happening yet on Side 1 of the cassette tape.
Sure, mulatto guitarist Tom Morello (Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper and KISS fan) is the political ideologue of the group (graduated with honors at Harvard in '85, major in social studies), but it is vocalist-rapper Zack de la Rocha who's the poet of RATM's rage, successfully taking after the revolutionary speak of Nicanor Parra or Pablo Neruda.
Why is RATM charming at all, even to those who hate their airwaves regime? Morello, sheerly for being black recalls Jimi Hendrix while we compare him to the occultist Jew Lenny Kravitz, achieves his own position in '90s rock history by melding Black Sabbath patterns (with quotes here and there from, possibly, Alice In Chains, grunge altogether, whoever else around) with the "melodic" potentials of rap c/o De La Rocha's Public Enemy salutes.
Each member, then, patterning himself in relation to the collective. Where nobody reigns supreme, except the common rage. (JSV)
APOLITICAL POLITICS
* * * * 3/4
BECK/Odelay (Geffen/BMG)No, we're not supposed to imagine hip-hop's dubs as real instrument sounds on a live stage, though we're free to do that. The genius is almost room-bound, where we might see an American boy working (or practicing) in his basement or library (or little streetcorner), trying to complicate life with an orchestra of sound quotes. Recently, though, hip-hop has become the public pyrotechnics medium as many electronica (trip-hop and some dub) became the more studio-bound art. The former is now performance-level entertainment that can be serious while the latter's serious playing-around went the way of being much like video games.
Beck brings the potentials of hip-hop, both in his performances and on record, into serious art. Not high art, whatever that is, just serious. Here, Beck is a poet. Here, Beck is also a composer/arranger. He does his special thing mostly through dubs, samples. Entertainment or political medium becomes art medium. Beck would object. His art is serious because it has entertainment (fun) and politics (aren't all landscape poetry political, after all?).
Whatever. Beck paints his American landscape, one that's not exactly far from what grunge would allow as reality, through words that can inspire even a humorless Rage Against The Machine fan. Then he paints an aural landscape that depicts and narrates and films through musical time the laid situation.
Sad-faced, humor-filled (!) Beck. Loser Beck stoned at Lollapalooza. Uncompromising, "uncommercial" Beck. Son of a Fluxus art movement member. Son of alienation music: hip-hop, Delta blues, Schubert, Bob Dylan, etc. Rich fan of young politics a la Public Enemy or Beastie Boys. Son of the South. Where he failed in his former outings to sum himself up, he here does it with the chutzpah that can only come from unbridled self-inspiration (after a long period of hibernation, keeping himself on the fringes of the industry).
Young at 25. Armed with the humor that enabled him to latch production work on to the Dust Brothers' own beat-humor brand. If only Beck's genius (though sincere) could have the raspy theatrics of a Cobain and a little of Rage's hate, then we can take his art more seriously beyond mere art and give him that last 1/4 to make a 5.
Then again, should all imaginative painters of reality be either nihilists or socialists? (JSV)
Copyright © 1999, 2000 Vicente-Ignacio Soria de Veyra. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or of any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
BACK TO JOJO'S MUSIC REVIEWS OMNIBUS PAGE
