Author Archives: Michael H. Little

This review does not end well. And how could it? Van Halen replaced David Lee Roth with a radish!

The result? One of the most demoralizing drop-offs in album quality in rock history. 1984 was a party, and even a hardcore guy like me got an invite. Follow-up 5150 was a staid and joyless affair, and heavily laden with the kinds of straight-faced AOR pop-shlock moves Roth wouldn’t have been caught dead singing. From “Jump” to “Love Walks In” is a quantum leap into a rancid vat of suck.

Say what you will about Diamond Dave, call him a buffoon or a bimbo, there’s no denying he’s a great American original. Sammy Hagar, on the other hand, is Everyman, and with him up front Van Hagar became Everyband–just another hard rock crew with crossover ambitions and an insurmountable anonymity problem. Talk about your Red Menaces–substitute the Red Rocker for Roth and what you have in 5150 is an album with all the charm of East Germany–it’s songs vary from dystopian drab to totalitarian gray.

5150 has literally nothing to recommend it aside from the guitar pyrotechnics of Mr. Valerie Bertinelli–with the exception of “Get Up,” even the hard rockers lack bite and pizzazz. There isn’t a “Jump” in the bunch. Hell, there isn’t a “Top Jimmy” in the bunch. Take away Diamond Dave, and Van Halen becomes one very generic proposition–think Survivor with better guitar solos.

5150’s three grace notes–and they’re minor ones for sure–are as follows:

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Look, I’ve only got about 10 minutes to write this review, because I just got a brand new chainsaw and I’m itching to use it on our too-big-for-our-kitchen table, so pay attention. These preternaturally prolific (they released 5 studio LPs in 2017 alone) Aussie shapeshifters have one of the dumbest monikers I’ve ever had the misfortune of running across, but don’t let it deter you from checking out their music.

King Gizzard is a difficult band to pigeonhole. AllMusic proclaimed the band’s 2016 LP Nonagon Infinity “maybe the best psych-metal-jazz-prog album ever,” which should give you some notion of these eclectic Australians’ genre-blending proclivities. They’ve also been labeled a garage rock band, but I’ll be damned if this stuff came out of a garage on my street. A garage with a rocket to Venus parked in it maybe, because this shit is strictly interplanetary.

Me, I’m inclined to file King Gizzard under Krautrock for Kangaroos, because they seem to embody many of the more groovy sounds of Baader-Meinhof era West Germany–the motorik propulsion of Neu! and Kraftwerk, the experimental jazz impulses of Can, and the stark weirdness of Amon Düül II. Drummers Eric Moore and Michael Cavanaugh break the speed limit throughout, vocalist Stu Mackenzie somehow manages to sound both excitable and robotic, and the band’s three guitarists conjure up static storms of hair-raising psychedelic electricity. Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s harmonica and organ provide both grit and coloration.

The album’s title is appropriate. Like the best of Neu! or Kraftwerk this is Autobahn Muzik, designed to put you in the fast lane on an endless superhighway to eternity. Mackenzie has described Nonagon Infinity as a “never-ending album,” with the closing track “linking straight back into the top of the opener like a sonic Mobius strip.” Songs meld seamlessly into one another–I still can’t hear the transition from “Robot Stop” to “Big Fig Wasp” and I’ve listened to the LP dozens of times–and the overall effect is mesmeric.

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Back in the day I went back on forth on Boston Very Baked Beans like a yoyo–liked ‘em in high school, loathed ‘em in college, then did what any sane person would do and put ‘em out of mind altogether. “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” didn’t exactly make me want to keep abreast of what Aerosmith was up to.

First year in the dorms at Shippensburg College Aerosmith were inescapable, what with my floor’s resident dope dealers Sheesh and Shrooms cranking the Toxic Twins around the clock, and I’ll never forget the day in the dining hall I warned ‘em Aerosmith would rot their brains, and if they really wanted to improve their minds they’d switch to Frank Zappa! Who at the time, if I recall correctly, was producing such IQ-raising fare as “Crew Slut” and “Wet T-Shirt Nite”!

Yeah, I was full of shit for sure. Because like ‘em or not, Aerosmith were on to something. Steven Tyler, Joe Perry and the boys fused the New York Dolls’ glam-rock sleaze with Led Zeppelin’s sonic bombast to produce a brand new kinda high-stepping boogie strut. Aerosmith translated the leer into sound, brought David Johansen’s trash raunch aesthetic to the unwashed masses, and gleefully knocked the blues topsy-turvy, tossing in a whole bunch of dirty limericks in the process.

Theirs was garage rock of a sort, but the garage had a supercharged 1964 Pontiac GTO in it. Fact is Aerosmith boogied faster than almost any machine on the streets back in 1975. Punk was considered the fleetest thing on wheels at the time, but the title track of Toys in the Attic crosses the finish line before anything on Never Mind the Bollocks, and it came out a year and a half earlier! And Tyler’s nursery rhymes for adults are anything but dumb–anybody who can fit poor Paul Getty’s ear into a lyric is A-OK by me.

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Back in the day my pals and I hated this MTV “video star” so much we dubbed him Billy Squealer, but in his brilliant and very off-kilter contribution to rock literature Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe Chuck Eddy puts Billy Squier’s 1981 LP Don’t Say No at No. 67, a ranking so disconcertingly high I had to wonder: Is the guy insane? Or are my ears for shit?

Only one way to find out–I had my girlfriend tie me to a chair, then put Don’t Say No on constant repeat. Fourteen hours later she came back, and found me babbling on about how Billy Squier was a hierophant of unapprehended inspiration and one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

“Who are you channeling?” she asked, patently concerned for my mental health. “Algernon Charles Swinbure? Jim Dandy Mangrum? I told you this was a bad idea. The album’s a goddamn loaded gun, and I’m going to hide it someplace where you can’t hurt yourself with it.”

“Don’t you dare,” I hissed. “Billy Squier’s a fucking wizard and a true star. Just listen to “My Kinda Lover.” It’s like Led Zeppelin and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had a baby! And… and… and “The Stroke” is a stroke of Gary Glitter Stomp Rock Genius and the best Suzi Quatro song I’ve ever heard in my life!”

A couple of days (and a whole shit of mood stabilizers) later, my feelings about Squier and Don’t Say No are a bit more… measured. I’m not going to sit here and tell you Squier’s some big musical genius because he ain’t–he’s just one helluva human synthesizer. On Don’t So No he updates Led Zeppelin for the MTV Era, giving Plant and Page a Power Pop gloss (shoulda started a band called Def Zeppelin!) while leaving himself just another wiggle room–unlike, say, the musical jaybirds in Whitesnake or Greta Van Fleet–to escape arrest on charges of being a craven LZ tribute act.

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How appropriate is it that Phil Collins owns one of the world’s largest collections of Alamo memorabilia?

I suppose he can relate. In fact I’ll betcha he thinks the boys at the Alamo had it easy. The Mexican army that surrounded them at the Alamo was, after all, only some paltry 1,500 men strong. Poor Phil, who spent the better part of the eighties as one of the most successful hit-making machines on Planet Earth, virtually overnight found himself surrounded by an army of haters that seemed to number in the millions. And you thought Jim Bowie and William B. Travis faced discouraging adds.

The “Phil Collins Backlash” constitutes an extraordinary phenomenon. When he was on top, both as a solo artist and with the band Genesis, Collins seemed to be unstoppable; Genesis’ 1986 LP Invisible Touch alone spawned five top 40 hits and went multi-platinum. Collins’ music was, arguably, as ubiquitous as Michael Jackson’s. As paradoxical as it may seem, his completely unremarkable face was the face of the eighties. By sinisterly plastering his Everyman’s mug on the covers of all four of his massively popular ’80s solo albums, he made sure of that.

And then something terrible happened; the world, as it were, turned on its head, and a sort of occult seismic shift of the collective unconscious occurred. And just like that Collins went from likable MOR standard-bearer to scapegoat, from the friendly guy with the safe and completely anodyne songs to the singular and loathsome manifestation of the everything that was horrible about the MTV Era.

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In the year punk broke, 1977, The Jam carried with them a whiff of a year far past, namely 1965. Paul Weller brought punk’s jacked-up velocity and coiled tension to the band’s debut LP, In the City, but the LP is also steeped in the spirit of Pete Townshend and The Who.

Call the Jam Mod revivalists, then, but make no mistake–the music on In the City is most definitely punk. No Mod ever took enough leapers to keep such a frenetic, breakneck pace. Paul Weller sounds a lot like Elvis Costello, but unlike Elvis he never slows things down–you won’t find a “Watching the Detectives” on In the City, much less an “Alison.” The song “Slow Down,” appropriately enough, goes by in a sonic blur.

Weller’s Who fetish wasn’t the only thing that set The Jam apart from the punk pack. They eschewed safety pins for tailored suits, said no thanks to anarchy in the U.K. and Clash/Mekons-style left-wing polemics, and even tossed in some conventional lyrics about, you know, girls and stuff.

And then there’s Weller’s voice. Rotten’s savage snarl, studied put-on or not, was pure punk, the barbaric yawp of a street-smart yob whose idea of a good time was ripping the antenna off your car. Weller sounds like a full-grown man.

Paradoxically, it was Weller’s backwards-looking glance to the days of “My Generation” that helped make The Jam something so defiantly, brazenly new. His “back to the future shtick” bears ripe fruit. “Art School” opens just like a Who song–for three seconds or so you’re sure the next thing you’ll hear is Roger Daltrey. But The Jam then proceeds to kick into hyperdrive, and you’re rocketed from yesterday to tomorrow in a rocket fuel flash.

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I’ve always considered Bon Jovi a disease–like kuru, say, only a helluva lot scarier. To contract kuru you have to live in New Guinea and eat contaminated human brains. You can contract Bon Jovi by turning on your car radio.

That said, I never–and I know I sound just like those people on TV commercials talking about horrible contractable diseases–thought it could strike me. I was certain I possessed the necessary modicum of native intelligence and impeccable musical taste to serve as a prophylaxis against Bon Jovi. I was sure it only afflicted those who in some way “deserved it.”

Then one day I was in the car with my girl and “Wanted Dead or Alive” came on the radio. And instead of throwing my arm out of joint in a python-quick lunge to turn the dial to another station like I’ve done hundreds of times before, I sat back in my seat and started singing along instead. And just that fast I was another victim. I had Bon Jovi.

We’ll talk more about how the disease spreads in a moment, but first let’s take a look at the disease itself. Jon Bon Jovi’s a kind of hybrid animal, a mediagenic mule–part unthinking man’s Bruce Springsteen and part hair metal satyr. Problem is he’s no Springsteen and too MOR to be a glam metal god, and you would think these would make him an unlikely candidate as a contractable disease.

Like Bruce he’s a New Jersey populist, but he lacks the Boss’ smarts and grit; if Springsteen’s spiritual hometown is Asbury Park, Jon’s is the Paramus Mall. And in comparison to your average glam metal sleazeball Bon Jovi comes off as the boy next door. Unlike Tommy Lee or Nikki Sixx, he would never slip your sister a mandrax or give her a dose of the syph; he’d have her home by 11 and your mom would love him.

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I don’t know about you, but I spend plenty of time thinking about the words I want engraved on my headstone. They’re going to be there for eternity, after all, so you want your epitaph to be both eye-catching and memorable. Over the years I’ve gone from E.M. Cioran’s, “Only one thing matters; learning to be the loser” to “Futility Lies Here” to “This is all your fault.” But I always come back to the aside Rick Derringer tosses off in the middle of “Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo,” to wit, “Did somebody say keep on rockin’?”

“Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” is one of rock’s greatest songs, and Derringer’s version is decidedly superior to the one recorded by Johnny Winter in 1970. Winter’s version is surprisingly sluggish, and it took Derringer, an axe-slinger more attuned to pure rock’n’roll than the blues, to really press down on the accelerator. And Derringer’s rock chops are what make his 1973 LP, All American Boy, so wonderful.

The ex-McCoy—you know, the band that gave us “Hang on Sloopy”—has very impressive bona fides as a sideman and hired gun. He has had a quasi-incestuous relationship with the Winter Brothers and participated in various of their projects, played on several Steely Dan tunes, was responsible for the guitar solo on Alice Cooper’s “Under My Wheels,” and played on Todd Rundgren’s best albums, including Something/Anything. And I’m just cherry picking here.

But it’s the solo (and star-studded) LP All American Boy that is his finest hour. It’s all over the place, but most of its songs work, and what we’re looking at here is a sadly neglected album of great merit. He certainly brought in the talent: Edgar Winter plays keyboards, David Bromberg plays guitar and dobro, Joe Walsh throws in on electric guitar, Bobby Caldwell handles drum chores, Suzi Quatro plays bass on those songs that Kenny Passarelli doesn’t, and Toots Thielemans even contributes on harmonica.

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Fans of the Fall, rejoice! No (alas!) Mark E. Smith has not risen from the grave, although if anyone could do it, the loud-mouthed Mancunian could. But get this–the members of the final and longest lasting iteration of the Fall–having inexplicably declined to sacrifice themselves on Smith’s funeral pyre–have formed a band instead!

They’re Imperial Wax (swiped the name of the first Fall LP they worked on, Imperial Wax Solvent, they did) and their debut LP from Saustex Records, Gastwerk Saboteurs, is great, remarkably assured, hard-driving stuff. (And just to get the business out of the way from the start, the LP comes complete with a download card that includes the whole megillah–along with three tracks not on the LP!)

The good news? Imperial Wax is in no way, shape or form a Fall tribute band. Sure, I hear occasional echoes of the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band on Gastwerk Saboteurs, but Imperial Wax shows no inclination to reproduce the Fall formula.

Hell, I’m not sure they could have if they’d tried. Mark E. Smith was every bit as irreplaceable as, say, the late great Ronnie Van Zant, and far more iconoclastic; even I could write a lame facsimile of a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, but a Fall song? And as for finding somebody who approached “singing” the way Smith did, well, forget about it.

No, Imperial War–they’re Keiron Melling on drums, Dave Spurr on bass, Pete Greenway on guitar, and newcomer Sam Curran on lead vocals and second guitar–have a sound that’s all their own, and have managed to put out a defiantly strong debut LP that includes a couple of songs–both the hard-driving “No Man’s Land” and the equally aggressive “The Art of Projection” come to mind–that in a just world would go to the Top of the Pops.

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What exactly does it take to bring the peace-loving and oh so friendly Belgian people to the brink of riot? Rising authoritarianism? A precipitous spike in beer prices? A brussels sprouts famine? How about the NYC synth-punk band Suicide?

If you guessed Suicide you’re right, and 23 Minutes Over Brussels proves it. This 1978 recording of a live show in Brussels, Belgium (initially issued as a flex-disc for a music magazine and subsequently released in 1998 along with the reissue of the band’s self-titled debut) is a comedy record right up there with Iggy and the Stooges Metallic K.O., and fans of rancor, chaos, band-baiting, and mutual crowd-band loathing will eat it up.

Seriously–the assembled throng at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels HATED Suicide. They hated ‘em enough to boo ‘em. They hated ‘em enough to attempt to drown ‘em out by shouting “Elvis! Elvis!” (they were there to see Costello). Hell, one enterprising hater even went so far as to swipe Alan Vegas’ microphone. Oh, and at some point in the evening (coulda been after the riot that followed Elvis’ show) somebody even got around to breaking Vega’s nose!

I can understand disliking Suicide–I’ve never been a big fan myself. Their minimalist approach (Alan Vega provided often unpleasant vocals, Martin Rev provided backing on synthesizer and primitive drum machine) to NYC punk remains an acquired taste and off-putting to many.

And Suicide were an unlikely mating with Costello, to say the least. But who’d have thunk the Belgians would go “Rites of Spring” ballistic on the poor guys? You think New York audiences are hostile? Those damn Europeans REALLY take their art music seriously!

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Is it just me, or is Nick Cave a bad poet and a parody of a Vegas lounge crooner?

I know the man has an enormous cult who think he’s this big literary genius (wrote a novel and everything!), but what I hear when I listen to 1992’s Henry’s Dream (The Bad Seeds’ seventh) is bad Walker Brothers-school shlock with more pretentious lyrics.

Murder ballad “John Finn’s Wife” may be a lot of things, but immortal poetry ain’t one of them; lines like “Dancers writhed and squirmed and then/Came apart and then writhed again/Like squirming flies on a pin” ain’t exactly going to win Cave an exulted place on Parnassus, people.

Cave’s music is certainly distinctive. His voice is stentorian and sepulchral–if a funeral parlor could sing, it would sound like our Nick. The music is brooding, blues-based and lachrymose to a fault, the stuff of seances, barroom wakes and Halloween soirees. Lyrically, Cave’s fixated upon death, murder, suicide–the usual gothic suspects. He also has a disconcerting knack for the flowery and literary. If you can tell me what “the loom of the land” means, I’ll give you five bucks (or as Nick would probably say, doubloons).

But to go back to the beginning, I suspect it’s just me. Cave’s such a gloomy Gus I want to pat him on the back and tell him everything’s going to be okay. Which is just another way of saying I can’t help but think of his unremitting morosity as anything but an annoying affection–a shtick that grates on my nerves, and fast.

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Swans’ 1983 debut LP Filth reminds me of the summers I spent working at an iron foundry. That foundry was a prodigy of chaos, noise and filth. This baby has it beat.

Me, I kinda dig Filth’s no-wave, proto-industrial clamor, and I’m not alone. After noting that “Not only isn’t it for everybody, it isn’t for hardly nobody,” Village Voice rock crit Robert Christgau wrote, “I think it’s a hoot.” And then there’s my pal Rick Piel, who said, “I love Swans. They’re like Pere Ubu without a good singer. Or good musicians. Or harmonies, rhythm and melody.”

Filth remains one of the most vicious assaults on human ears ever released, and producing such a preternatural din wasn’t easy–it took two bassists, two drummers (who occasionally abandoned their kits to strike tables with metal straps) and a guitarist who approached his instrument like a man applying a steel file to a cheese grater to do it.

And over it all Michael Gira, whose muscular vocals make him sound like a man who’s singing while bench-pressing heavy weights, invokes scenes of submission, humiliation, and depravity. He keeps things monotonously simple, repeating the same ugly phrases over and over; on “Blackout” he bellows, “Get drunk! Get drunk!” and “Don’t breath in! Don’t Breath in!” And that’s pretty much the formula throughout. Gira the minimalist makes man-of-few-words Iggy Pop sound downright verbose.

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I’ve never warmed up to synthesizers, and isn’t that the point? They’re supposed to sound steely cold and inhuman–they’re machines, for christ’s sake, and utterly incapable of that friendly human touch one associates with, say, Eddie Vedder or your local insurance agent.

For this reason and many others having to do with angular haircuts and architectural clothing I’ve always abhorred English synthpop. But that was before I finally managed to overcome my atavistic aversion to the stuff long enough to listen to one of the grandaddies of them all–Gary Numan’s 1979 LP The Pleasure Principle.

Nothing succeeds like excess, and on his first post-Tubeway Army outing Numan dispensed with the electric guitars and went full robot. What’s more, not only do the synthesizers sound like machines–he does too. As a result this fancy piece of state-of-the-art electronics with its telegraphic one-word song titles is as cold as Antarctica–colder even because Gary got rid off all the penguins!

The Pleasure Principle–which is all about the pleasures and perils of alienation, and the myriad disadvantages of being sentient–may be as frigid as a meat locker, but it’s as hook-filled as a meat locker too. But not always–Numan also tosses in some frosty and atmospheric instrumentals (“Airlane,” “Asylum”) along the lines of David Bowie’s ambient work with Brian Eno. (As for the non-instrumentals, some bring to mind Eno’s early solo work, sans quirks.)

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My Bloody Valentine’s famously obsessed frontman spent 3 long years and a whole shitload of other peoples’ money making this 1991 shoegaze classic, and he didn’t deliver a follow-up until 2013. Seems Kevin Shields found Kevin Shields a tough act to follow. As for the guy whose money he spent (Creation Records honcho Alan McGee), his verdict on the record is on the record. In 2014 he said, “Loveless is fucking overrated as fuck.”

Well I humbly fucking disagree. While there are brief moments on Loveless when my attention wanders, My Bloody Valentine’s “sheets of tampered guitar noise meet dreamy melodies and hushed vocals” recipe is a winning one. The songs contained therein are simultaneously abrasive and deliciously mesmerizing–Loveless is as hypnotic a drug as nembutal, but it won’t put you too sleep.

The formula’s simple–Shields utilizes a whole mess of tricks (reverse reverb, tremolo techniques, tuning systems, samplers, etc.) to create oceanic swells and tidal washes of guitar that he harnesses to beguiling melodies over which he and Bilinda Butcher sing like sedated angels. Every single review I’ve ever read has described the guitars on this record as “swirling,” but that’s not what I hear. I hear churning–the churning of raw distortion into creamy dream pop butter.

Both mood and volume vary–for some reason “Only Shallow” and “What You Want” are twice as loud as anything else on the LP–but for the most part what you get are a set of songs that sound, well, like some mad genius fucked with them in the studio until they sounded wrong–wrong in such a way that obliges you, dear listener, to grow an entirely new set of ears in order to hear them right. And you do. After a while the brain-melting seesaw guitars and slushy and pureed vocals not only begin to make sense but to sound inevitable–as inevitable as any great forward leap in music, or any of the arts for that matter.

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I suppose you’re asking yourself why I’m wasting my valuable time writing about Mike + The Mechanics, and more importantly, why you should waste your valuable time reading about them. But before I get around to answering that question, I must ask another question: Would you really let this so-called supergroup of English wheelnut monkeys anywhere near your car?

Oh, and I can only answer the first question (this is getting confusing, I know) by asking yet another question. To wit, what exactly was it that made this vapid Genesis offshoot’s 1988 debut LP Living Years such a smashing commercial success? Did living breathing human beings really hanker for music that was even blander and more faceless than the bland and faceless “product” Phil Collins’ Genesis was supersaturating the airwaves with? Is it possible they found the likes of Duke and Abacab too musically challenging?

It’s a demoralizing thought. The generic pablum produced by Mike + The Mechanics–who were led by Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford and included two vocalists named Paul (Carrack and Young, respectively)–is a lot of things, but idiosyncratic ain’t one of ‘em. These guys aren’t your colorful auto jockeys down the street, who crank Motörhead in the garage and drink beer during work hours. They’re a chain, like Midas, and their songs are antiseptic outlets that all look exactly the same. Just look for the big yellow sign!

The music on Living Years is (to switch metaphors on ya) white bread and margarine, flavorless fare incapable even of inducing heartburn. If music (here I go again!) is a drug, Living Years is a placebo–in single-blind clinical trials almost 70 percent of participants thought they were listening to real music!

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