The Wu-Tang Clan Returns; And the Chemical Brothers; The Utah Saints; Lorette Velvette
With all the glitz and hype surrounding so much popular hiphop these days (like Dre and Eminem albums fraught with self-referential, persecuted-millionaire rap-star stories and the gold-teeth, bling-bling bullshit of the Cash Money Dirty South), it's nice when someone hits us with a record that simply lays down the rules for how hiphop is supposed to be done. This new Wu-Tang Clan joint comes without the help of soap opera fanfare and gimmickry. They don't try to explore new territories like Outkast or preach black separatism like Dead Prez; Wu-Tang is just holding it down for the heads out here in the hiphop mecca who don't need novelty or celebrity drama to tell the difference between a good rap record and a mediocre one.
That isn't to say a new Wu-Tang record is without subtext. From the start the Clan was as much about a marketing plan as it was about hiphop, and that's always cast a shadow of doubt as to their motivation. But their plan never would have worked if the hiphop were anything less than superior, as it was on a string of subpar Wu member solo records released in the late 90s. The hype over the Wu grows out of a very simple realization that they know how to lay it down better than any other crew out there. Whether or not they'll bother giving us the good stuff is another story.
RZA first reintroduced the old-school, ass-whuppin' Wu-Tang style when he whipped up some of his trademark menacing, heavy beats for Ghostface Killah's unique, insider lyrical wordplay on Supreme Clientele (released last winter). That whet more than a few appetites for a return to the slamming Wu shit (and, no doubt, another string of solo follow-ups). Enter W, which proves that no matter what you think of these guys and their plot to take over the world, it's just plain fact that they do straight-up hiphop as good as anyone else in the game.
Heavy yet laidback, meticulously produced yet somehow almost sloppy, RZA's hard, lo-fi beats and the posse of Wu MCs like Raekwon, Method Man, U-God and GZA deliver a record firmly planted in East Coast street hiphop. The campy swordsman shtick and tough-guy skits of the past make only fleeting appearances on W. In fact, other than dope beats and intense, playful rhymes, there isn't a whole lot of anything here. And on "Hollow Bones" RZA strips down an already minimalist beat even further by removing drums and leaving only a funky soul bassline and vocal refrain to keep pace for Ghostface and Inspectah Deck (probably the most underrated Wu MC) to go buck wild with some no-nonsense MC braggadocio: "I feel like a superhero talking like a true De Niro/They boost his ego found him broke down, reduced to zero."
For some reason, nine MCs wasn't enough for the Clan this time around, so Redman was asked to kick some hard rhymes on "Redbull," Busta Rhymes lets loose on "The Monument," Nas contributes on "Let My Niggas Live" and Isaac Hayes lends his baritone to the sentimental black violence message track "I Can't Go to Sleep." The Wu shows that they're not even fronting on the West Coast/East Coast tip by letting Snoop bust his lazy flow alongside a typically strange, dementedly humorous Ol' Dirty Bastard track, "Conditioner."
The only remotely gimmicky device on the record was the decision to ask raga vocalist Junior Reid to belt lyrics on a couple tracks. But both tracks he appears on ("Jah World" and "One Blood Under a W") feature a menacing, chest-pounding RZA beat to keep things on the streets of Staten Island even as the vocals hint at a warm Jamaican beach.
The only weak song here is the shamelessly poppy single "Gravel Pit," but lest we forget, the Wu-Tang Clan is a business, and a little MTV play goes a long way when you're trying to spark the next Wu invasion.
Mike Bruno
Likewise, punk. Neither the Clash nor the Sex Pistols were doing anything musically that the Kinks and the Who hadn't purloined a decade before. Come 2000, and it must be time for every bloody artist in the bloody UK chart to use the vocoder voice device first pioneered by George Martin (see "Mean Mr. Mustard") and Kraftwerk decades before.
All this makes the attitude of industry power brokers in the late 80s and early 90s toward the use of samples in dance music particularly hypocritical. Remember that ridiculous slogan, Keep Music Live! What the hell was that supposed to mean? That you weren't allowed to mime, use synthesizers, drum machines? Take it to the logical extreme, and amplification of any sort should have been banned. Samples are a simple way of refreshing the past. Everything is part of everything else. Nothing exists without context, and pop culture continually regurgitates itself, in fresh and startling ways.
The title of the new Utah Saints album is ironic. Their second album proper was indefinitely shelved in 1995, after the Leeds duo fell foul of Someone Who Had Lots of Money to Spend on Legal Battles and Didn't Like the Idea of New Technology Being Used to Create Pop Music. Perhaps someone felt that Jez Willis and Tim Garbutt hadn't "paid their dues." (If so, they were wrong. The duo had produced some 12-inch singles of an unlikely electro-gothic hybrid under the name MDMA in the late 80s.) Perhaps they felt it was Kate Bush's charms and the talent of the Eurythmics that had been responsible for the pair's meteoric rise to fame in the early 90s. (Both artists turned up in samples on Utah Saints singles.) God, how stupid.
In two weeks in 1993, Utah Saints supported East 17, Take That and U2 at Wembley Stadium, and then joined Moby and Prodigy on the road in Europe. Their debut album sampled Slayer and Front 242.
Utah Saints thoroughly deserved their fame and sales. Their music makes even fellow innovators like Chemical Brothers and Underworld look tired. So we come to Two, seven years and many court cases later. Bang up-to-date, and still eager to reclaim their role as true dance music innovators, Utah Saints are now in a position to invite some of their pop cultural heroes into the studio with them. On tour recently, the group performed alongside Chrissie Hynde, Edwin Starr, Edwyn Collins and even Michael bloody Stipe. Oh great, art rock meets dance.
Surprisingly, it's nowhere near as bad at it looks on paper: Utah Saints possess easily enough energy and instinct to overcome any intrusive dabbling from Phil Collins soundalikes. It's a good job, too. The slap-headed presence of Stipe is all over this album. He cowrote four tracks, speaks the intro to the spooky "Rhinoceros" and otherwise tries to look credible and young. Don't worry. You wouldn't notice. The beat goes on, and the beat goes on. Drums keep pounding rhythm to the brain.
Elsewhere, the guest stars are better suited. Soul man Edwin Starr gets down on the upbeat "Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On." Another touring partner, Chuck D, reprises his whole fear of a black planet thang on "Power to the Beats." Metal is incorporated via diehards Metallica, while even the Pretenders' "I Go to Sleep" is sampled on the oddball "Lost Vagueness." And sure, there's some Stooges. How couldn't there be?
Twenty years of popular music assimilated and given fresh blood on the third (recorded) album from Utah Saints. This is a treat!
Everett True
Such dichotomy is her m.o. On the one hand, Velvette is a swaggering rock queen like Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde or PJ Harvey. On "Come on Over," she leads the band through a vibrating horizontal riff we've all heard a thousand times: almost a Bo Diddley shuffle, but with a more sinister quality?it's all in the rhythm, and the rhythm is as primal as they come. We find it affecting us again and again and we are helpless before its seductive impulses. "I ain't your momma," Lorette purrs, "I can't tell you what to do." As the riff pulsates there are staccato bursts of random guitar noise, which is the Sonic Youth quotient that effects all postmodern ravings like this. But there's also a lot of canned electronic crap, which suggests that if the right svengali?i.e., someone other than a scumbag like Falco?dangled that showbiz carrot in front of her pouty snout, Lorette Velvette might contemplate biting the big one. She could be as big as Poe by next year. But she'll have to drop the punk-queen persona.
Which shouldn't be too hard for her, since she's not really into it that deep. One of her problems is she can't really decide what she wants to be. Is she the vile temptress of "Come on Over" and "Don't Crowd Your Mind" (where she drawls "baby, drive me home" to a substandard hack-rock riff) or the blues "purist" who apes the Stones on her version of "You Got to Move"? It was a lazy cop-out for the Stones, and it's even worse here. Admittedly, her delivery ain't much worse than Mick's, but at least the Stones came up with the idea of covering this drag-ass tune. Why's she reiterating it here? If the closest she gets to the blues is a lame Stones cover, then the Memphis tag?which is three-fourths of her whole reputation?is mere window dressing.
She's much better when she's teetering on the brink of grunge- and grime-laden madness with her own spiffy compositions like "Rude Angel" and "Dream Hotel," which sounds like an outtake from Rocky Horror. There's a heavy glam-rock quotient here. She covers Bowie's "Boys Keep Swinging" and Marc Bolan's "20th Century Boy." She plays up the hick thing again in "Going Down South" and it's plodding enough to give it a genuine walking-barefoot-through-the-cow-pastures quality. "God Forsaken Town" is actually lucid enough to be worthy of a Lucinda Williams. If one of these metro-country stars decided to cover it, this one could even get on the radio. However, on its own, Lorette's nascent croak isn't quite radio-ready. Which probably suits her fine, since she's seemingly entrenched in that indie-undie loser mentality. Why else would she claim kinship with Alex Chilton? He may be a "legend" down there, but outside of Memphis nobody gives a shit about him.
And speaking of legends, she also does an instrumental version of John and Yoko's "Happy Xmas," which sounds like the 101 Strings Orchestra on acid. With the guidance of some female peers like Barbara Manning or Azalia Snail or even Mary Helium, Lorette could really be Queen of the Hop. Come on, big sisters, help a li'l sister do her thang.
Joe S. Harrington
It's a quality that also defines the only rock/pop musician to continue making compelling political music over the last 20 years?Robert Wyatt. Wyatt's solo music (most of which was created after a fall from a window in 1973 that left him paralyzed) rages against colonialism and capitalism run amok, yet it is filtered through idiosyncratic rhythms (jazz and world beat) and quavering vocals that lend it considerable fluidity, compassion and intimacy. Soupsongs Live is a double CD of Wyatt's solo work ranging from 1974's Rock Bottom to 1998's Shleep, played live last October in the UK by a crack jazz and rock band including Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera and trombonist Annie Whitehead. It's a fabulously buoyant set that fleshes out the often arid landscapes of Wyatt's work, pushing them a bit more toward the mainstream without steamrolling their oddity, humor and charm.
There are a number of gems among the 23 songs included here and almost no duds. (The only one that I can point to as hollow is the light-fantastic version of Old Rottenhat's "Gharbzadegi," which lacks the cumulative emotional wallop of the original.) Wyatt's politics has never sounded so good, sung sweetly by vocalists Julie Tippetts and Ian Maidman and swinging with brass and electric guitar. The earlier Wyatt stuff from Rock Bottom and 1975's Ruth Is Stranger than Richard is notoriously difficult, welding fusion and free-form jazz to traditional rock structures that he helped to explode in his years as drummer and vocalist for Soft Machine. Tempo turns on a dime in songs like "Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road" (from Rock Bottom) and "Solar Flares" (from Ruth), and the band assembled by Annie Whitehead is up to reinterpreting some of Wyatt's most brilliant work some 25 years on. (All of Ruth Is Stranger than Richard, save Charlie Haden's "Song for Che," is covered on Soupsongs Live, making it a handy instant introduction to Wyatt's eccentric masterpiece.)
Harder still, perhaps, is filling out the dry textures of Wyatt's post-1980 work. Soupsongs is particularly wonderful in this regard. Wyatt's later work is often recorded with nothing more than his voice and a keyboard, leaving a huge canvas for his jazz interpreters to color in or ruin. The result on Soupsongs is infinitely more colorful than ruinous. The highlight may be an astounding take on the 1991 Wyatt LP Dondestan's "Left on Man," which opens with Ian Maidman's deft plucking of a ukulele and then sways into a groovy samba beat that swells into a chanted chorus of "Simply/Reduce/Oversimplify." It's more than a cover; it's a reimagining of the song that pushes it upward and outward.
Equally wonderful is the band's rendering of Shleep's "The Duchess," which captures every bit of the smirky sex and Sturm und Drang in the original and then some. Put simply, Soupsongs Live is one of those rare tribute albums that targets a worthy object and doesn't screw up the essence of what makes his music worth admiring.
Richard Byrne
On their last record, Surrender, the Chems basically admitted that they've changed. The club-ready Big Beat was largely replaced by smoother electro sounds and a shiny pop sheen. They even got one of the whiny Oasis brothers to sing on "Let Forever Be." It's not their best record, but it is their most distinct, and it gave us a glimpse of what we might expect now that they're growing out of the all-nighter, every nighter phase of their lives.
The Chemical Brothers say that this interim release, the Music: Response EP, is their way of commemorating the sold-out world tour they did in support of Surrender. My guess is it's more like the best way they could think of to tide over the rabid fans waiting for their next LP while still allowing them to take some time off and give their 30-year-old fingers a break from the months and months of knob-twisting while on tour.
Six of these seven tracks were previously unreleased in the U.S. Along with the album version of Surrender's best song, "Music: Response," there're also two dancefloor-ready remixes of the track. The spatial Gentleman Thief mix adds several new layers of percussion and a disco house bassline to the thumping 4/4 beat, and the eight-and-a-half-minute Futureshock Main Response mix puts a somewhat psychedelic trance spin on the song with a rolling bassline, analog sounds and spacey, skittering synth lines. Like they did with the "Brothers Gonna Work it Out" mix CD released after their Dig Your Own Hole tour in 1998, these remixes are the Chems' way of demonstrating for the doubters that they're still dancefloor at heart.
Other tracks are less noteworthy. "Freak of the Week" is a simple house track almost saved from the dregs of postrave mediocrity by a funky breaks interlude that few other producers could pull off, and "Enjoyed" creates a trippy, sitar-laden journey out of the driving New Order-esque bassline from "Out of Control." They also included two live tracks, "Out of Control" and "Got Glint?"?both snipped from their headlining spot at Glastonbury 2000?in which little is added to the originals other than a roaring crowd and some high-pitched synth noodling. It's nice, though, to hear that they've added some live improvisation to their stadium performance (too many electronic dance music artists still call bobbing up and down behind equipment racks while the DATs play their music a live show).
Oh yeah, it's also an enhanced CD, with a version of the "Let Forever Be" video, which is pretty cool. But overall this EP is just between-albums filler aimed at the diehards.
Mike Bruno