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 Anger,
Horror, Introspection
By
Bill Ketzer
Slipknot
Vol.
3: The Subliminal Verses (Roadrunner)
Slipknot
are not your typical angry boy band. They quantify anger in
such a way as to deny all personal satisfaction in its manifestation
in their psyche. There is no hedonism, no ESPN-2 bullseye
beneath their hardened veneer. Anger is eaten and expelled
in horrific aural tapestries of phobia and murder. The strict
codes of violence wrought in the band’s first two CDs were
not a quality so much as they were a boundary, however, insomuch
as they presented the music as a defilement to be jettisoned
out of that boundary. In an alarming act of personal growth,
the unlikely band of nine soundly obliterate the hard shell
of their hate-encrusted past with the coarsely introspective
Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses. Appearing to loosely
resemble some sort of conceptual experience, the album—deliberately
free of expletives, radio-ready and poignant—remains a phantasmatic,
autonomously brutal force.
Oh, it’s still all here, all the death, suffering, horror
and abjection; all the complicitous sarcasm, the excessive
fixation on damnation and fear. But Slipknot’s impetuous engine
is fueled this time by a simmering self-reckoning, almost
as if the demon has suffered a lapse and the resulting logistical
prose reeks of beauty, in spite of itself. Yes, the drop-tuned
hooks and syncopated breakdowns are still impossibly apocalyptic
(check out “The Blister Exists” and “Before I Forget”), but
the sheer listenability of the effort, the choruses instantly
memorable, the structures possibly more familiar, takes it
to a whole new level. It may lose them some fans, but I suspect
not many. The songwriting is simply remarkable, with stunning
if archetypal performances by drummer Joey Jordinson and guitarists
James Root and Mick Thompson. Corey Taylor proves to be the
biggest surprise, displaying a diversity that eluded him previously,
from the gentle sincerity of “Circle” to the WWE-meets-Ministry
“Pulse of the Maggots.” This is a headphone CD for sure, with
producer Rick Rubin and engineer Greg Fidelman (Audioslave,
Jet, Life of Agony) making sure you hear every excruciating
crack and whisper inside the bands collective explosive ethereal
plane. The disc kind of craps out at the end with the plodding,
grating filler of “The Virus of Life,” and the highly derivative
“Danger—Keep Away” with its Ty Tabor-style vocal harmonies,
but then that’s just the kind of anomaly one might expect
from a tribe who seek to tame their cannibalism.
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Wreckless
Eric
Bungalow
Hi (Southern Domestic)
Wreckless Eric’s career started with a relative bang in his
British homeland (a couple hits on the Stiff label in the
late ’70s) and since has taken turns that have shaken all
but the most dogged fans. Possessing more exuberance and intuitive
impulses than traditional skills, he resurfaced in the ’80s
under the name of the Len Bright Combo. This brilliantly committed
trio cranked out two albums quickly and disappeared. Under-promoted
and underdistributed, the U.K.-only albums were ahead of the
curve on the lo-fi front and contained the should-be classics
“Someone Must Have Nailed Us Together” and “You’re Gonna Screw
My Head Off.” He moved to France, doing work under his own
adopted name and also a U.S. release with his Hitsville House
Band (invitingly solid and virtually ignored). A U.K. memoir,
A Dysfunctional Success, appeared last year.
Now Eric Goulden is back under the Wreckless mantle with Bungalow
Hi, which contains both stunning revelations and songs.
Recording on his own in the past, he tossed production finesse
out the window of the speeding car of his creative impulses.
But he wasn’t necessarily going after muddy sound as much
as he was going after immediacy. Now with desktop digital
recording rigs sprouting across the land like a happy rash,
Goulden has found the perfect set of tools. He’s capturing
his inclinations and doing so without lowering the sonic bar.
Furthermore, his musical palette, always rather simple, has
broadened a bit. The disc opens with the atmospheric title
track, making it clear he’s been finding new sounds in his
home studio. This gives way to the familiar sounds of his
ultra-English diction and choice of words with “Same,” an
autobiographical number that’s at once downbeat and friendly.
At the heart of the set is the incredible “33s + 45s.” This
tale of a relationship ended is set against a lifetime love
of music and finds new and personal ways to explain both.
—David
Greenberger
Marianne
Faithfull
Before
the Poison (Anti)
The sexiest crone of all, Marianne Faithfull doesn’t care
about the upbeat. Her specialty is weariness, her approach
guarded, her artistry surely and painfully earned. On her
first album in nearly three years, she allies with fellow
darkness connoisseurs PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, who contribute
marvelous work. So does Blur-man Damon Albarn, whose “Last
Song” is among the loveliest and most idyllic that Faithfull,
the legendary bird of the original swinging London, has ever
articulated. By now, Faithfull can express almost anything,
not surprising considering the woman sang the pastoral “As
Tears Go By” and the fantastic, and sadly wise, “Sister Morphine”
in the same decade, the ’60s. For the past 25 years, however,
Faithfull has been her own person: femme fatale, junkie, domestic
goddess, theatrical figure, all rolled into one. All those
personae come together here, particularly in the tunes by
Harvey. The Polly Jean tracks seem to burrow instantly into
Faithfull’s mind whether they speak of love (the throbbing,
urgent “The Mystery of Love”), friendship (the oddly calming
“My Friends Have”) or generational kissoff (the paradoxically
dismissive/affectionate “No Child of Mine”). The Cave tunes,
helped by several Bad Seeds, are even darker and perhaps more
strained; “Desperanto,” a Heaven 17-styled rant against vibes
gone particularly bad since 9/11, jars what otherwise is a
wonderfully smooth, wonderfully disturbing album. Faithfull’s
benchmark remains her startling 1979 album, “Broken English,”
a singular declaration of feminist despair. But “Before the
Poison,” despite occasional lapses of tone (Faithfull’s lyrics
on “City of Quartz” are great but Jon Brion’s music is a tad
dainty), comes up similarly long and timeless.
—Carlo
Wolff
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