Concerts News
Earbender Reviews Lou Reed and Tom Waits
This week, O Undaunted and Disequilibrium'd, we take a look-see at a couple of the new releases as we beat with grey, arterial, mid-week palpation. I, presumably like you, are looking through a barrell-aged brown hoping to find a way past the ponderous, cranial montage.
It ain't easy, but...
The moments of a Merce Cunningham-esque kind of grace are (reminder) very few and (reminder) far between, so not to disrupt you from the inauspicious, insipid, or inane, but take some time. For yourself. Start here.
The reviews this week lather the blather on two musical veterans. The icons, the demigods: Lou Reed and Tom Waits.
First, Louis.
Lou Reed has collaborated with Metallica to create LuLu. Some were stunned at the announcement of the collabo; I was fatigued. The last time a Lou Reed record spilled into my space with any frequency was the 1992's 14-track life and death cycle, Magic and Loss. As for Metallica it was even earlier (1988) and I kept the thrash, hammering and rage of And Justice For All to and for myself and whomever I could sucker into listening to the carnage with me (surprisingly few).
Now these two artisans are in a heavy-metal (I can already hear the rebuttals) love nest. This trashy 90 minute song albatross, based on the German playwright Frank Wedekind's 1913 play about the life of an abused dancer, is a real keeper. Seriously, I'm addicted to listening to the infliction of this "smarting" aggression. I say "smarting" aggression because I don't feel any threat, but I do sense a bit of menace. No, not exactly menace, more like a discomfiting comfort, something like tonguing a canker sore. Think of Metallica's The Black Album's commercial radio buddy-buddy: overproduced, simple, hard rock sound playing with? against? around? amid? Lou Reed's talk-sing dramaTICS. And the lyrics? Well...
"I would cut my legs and (breasts) off
When I think of Boris Karloff and Kinski
In the dark of the moon
It made me dream of Nosferatu
Trapped on the Isle of Doctor Moreau
Oh wouldn't it be lovely."
Here are some instructions to accompany a Lulu listening party: First, insult everyone out of the room. Next, drink copious amounts of something from the American South. Finally, scream until you're hoarse: "pumping blood!"
Intriqued? I dare you. Listen.
As for Tom Waits' new one, Bad As Me (is this album number 17? I think so), Waits, with his wife/collaborator Kathleen Brennan alongside guest musicians such as Marc Ribot, Flea, Keith Richards, and Les Claypool, have tenderly loved us with 13 songs scrounging up themes of love and mortality. This 61-year-old fine bard romps, stomps, chugs, kisses, scratches, weeps (almost), and sings (yes yes yes the gravel is still there in the voice!) I mean where was it going to be dumped? for forty minutes or more. Forty minutes of Waits staggering off from and coming back again to his convulsive guitar, and the brawler bawler and bastard pianos, saxes, harmonica, trombones, trumpets and organs to lyrics like these:
"You're the letter from Jesus on the bathroom wall
You're mother superior in only a bra
You're the same kind of bad as me."
Hear it.
Later.
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