Reviews

Acme
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

Unbutton your pantiests, slip Acme underneath your undies and you're bound to provoke a positive reaction. At its most basic, the JSBX's music stimulates the most basic desire: hot, sticky, down and dirty, freaky-deaky. I'm talkin' about fuckin', people.

Still, there's more to the Blues Explosion than rocket-powered hip thrusts. The Blues Explosion wear their record collections on their sleeves. This potential foible is not a problem, however, when their collections include Chuck Berry, Iggy and the Stooges, Let It Bleed-era Rolling Stones, the thin Elvis Presley, Steady B, and a 10th generation field-recording of Mississippi Fred McDowell howling away in a long-forgotten juke joint. All these influences form like Voltron into a wholly original musical style that is pure auditory pleasure.

Acme is somewhat of a departure from the Blues Explosion's previous recordings. Basically it's more funk and less punk. It's much smoother than they have ever sounded before. This development has come to the consternation of some fans who have come to expect the more rugged lo-fi, R&B-tinged assault the JSBX were founded on, especially after the hard-rockin' last album, Now I Got Worry. Though this album is filled with plenty of show-stopping tracks (particularly "Calvin" and "Torture"), it does lag a little around the 3/4 mark. But that, my friend, is the beauty of CD players: you can jump 4 minutes into the future with a single push of a button.

I could go through the album track by track, but that's not much fun and it doesn't really tell you all that much anyway. Instead, I'll break Acme down like this: it rocks, it rolls, it swaggers, it sways, it does the one-legged pimp strut, it wears black leather pants to the supermarket, it can do The Robot, it sleeps until 1:38 PM, it has cigarettes for lunch, it kisses with tongue, it makes your mother nervous, it is double-jointed in all the right places, it uses Pomade as its primary hair styling product, it leaves dirty messages on your answering machine.

- Eric Ducker

News From the 70's
Anthony Braxton

Imagine being one of the world's most prolific musicians as well as an under-acknowledged genius. You release only a small portion of the music you have recorded over the last 30 years, storing a box of unreleased material in your basement. The tapes in this box mostly hold the musical stories of known and unknown concerts from the 1970s when you were creating some of the most beautiful solo, duo and quartet music of your career. You are Anthony Braxton.

Next imagine you are a fellow musician and journalist who has long admired Braxton's work. You travel to his home in Connecticut and happen to be taken into his basement where you find this box of tapes. Anthony even allows you to take several of these tapes back to Italy where you proceed to compile six of the best recordings to be put on a CD and shared with the world. You are Francesco Martinelli.

Finally imagine you have chanced upon the collaboration of these two men committed to creating and distributing music often dismissed as too academic and free for the jazz idiom. While the concert dates for several of the pieces on this CD are sketchy and the sound quality sometimes less than ideal, the power of the music is easily discernable. Travelling between the alternating structured and improvised nature of "Composition 23E," the angular theme of "Composition 2" and the Dave Holland 'hit,' "Four Winds, " your ear is treated to the full range of Braxton's quartet work. While the solo saxophone piece, "Composition 8g", with its yelps and shrieks seems more sonically akin to the saxophone percussion duo piece, "Composition 1," than the other saxophone solo, "Composition 8c," all three demonstrate the passion that is trademark Braxton. Not only do you delight in the stillness of "Composition 8c" but you also revel in the racing energy of "Four Winds." The contrasts are complementary and serve to capture the musical concepts which are part of the Braxton musical continuum. The album is News from the 70s, and you are the listener. So listen.

- Susan Sakash

Clarity
Jimmy Eat World

...Mmm, sanitized emo-pop for the masses. I swear that these guys once rocked, or at least they did on their last album and some of the earlier 7"s. Now they're whiny, annoying, and mediocre. I saw them play a great show up in Boston last month (though At the Drive In completely blew them away); it was broadcast on one of Boston's "alternative" stations, so maybe someone thinks these kids are going to be the next big thing. Regardless, I was pretty excited to listen to the new album, which someone I know had heard was amazing. Clarity is their second major-label album. It's a much cleaner, more produced sound than their earlier stuff, i.e. they got rid of all the screaming and noise and other neat stuff that made Static Prevails, their '96 album, fun and worth listening to. Aside from "Blister," the only song on the album that even attempts to approximate their former sound, the whole thing is sweet, annoying, and has lyrics that discuss butterflies. "Your New Aesthetic" contains the fairly ironic exhortation to "make them open the request line and let selection kill the old," which I assume is a subliminal suggestion to get the kids to call up and request all of their radio-friendly hits. Overall, this album is fine and easy to listen to, but it's also sorta boring, routine, and a disappointing follow-up to their previous releases.

- Jen Kaminsky

Stereotype A
Cibo Matto

There's no worse feeling in the world than the sharp, piercing sensation that you get when you impale yourself on a very large, very sharp knife. The feeling of massive disappointment in an album recently released by a favorite band (after an equally massive anticipatory period) may be a close second, however. It's happened twice this month: first Mogwai followed up their two dynamic LPs (and their equally impressive remixes and singles) with the altogether boring post-lite-rock of Come On Die Young. Now it's Cibo Matto's turn.

On their new LP, Stereotype A, the New York duo seems to trade in the vitality and energy of their previous work for watered-down, over-produced, overly-cute, neo-lounge stylings. OK, so some will argue they've always been known for their cuteness, and that the music always played second fiddle to the idea of two female MCs rhyming about food and sex in broken English. Wrong. Viva! La Woman had its share of kitchiness, but the beats were slammin' as well, and the songs were fucking good. Live, they translated the tracks into pure energy, turning "Know Your Chicken" into a metal anthem, and "Birthday Cake" into the type of hip-hop/punk fusion that actually worked. Both in performance and on record, the essence of the songs and the personalities of the performers reinforced each other.

On Stereotype A, though, all we're left with is that superficial cuteness. The songs seem, for the most part, recycled, rehashed, and really really bad. The one immediately recognizable track, "Spoon" (featured on the Super Relax EP), takes on a smoothness that mows down the energy and originality of its predecessor, ending up sounding like a cover of the song done by a frat-boy funk band. The neotropical sound of "Flowers" does nothing to fill the gaping holes in the songwriting that are so very, very evident. The sounds aren't even interesting anymore, and the lyrics definitely aren't ­ there's only so many Obi-Wan references one can take. When Miho and Yuka delve into hip-hop, the results are equally disastrous and, more than anything else, embarrassing. And on the pseudo-metal "Blue Train," Cibo end up sounding more like Tia Carrere's band from Wayne's World than the eclectic and adventurous artists we (thought we) knew and loved. Failed attempts at trendy vocoded voices follow on "Clouds" and "Mortming." The last straw, "Speechless," starts off like the type of bad nouveau-gospel you hear at Amateur Night, and goes nowhere fast. It's the most unremarkable track on an album that's chock full of them.

And perhaps that's Stereotype A's greatest fault: it's unremarkableness. It's a difficult album to completely bash because it's just so damn mediocre. There's nothing here to distinguish this music from that on any throwaway CD you may run across in the 3 for $1 bin. It's a mishmash of mismatched styles, with no sign of the deft, subtle, artistic touch that they displayed on Viva! and Super Relax. While Stereotype A doesn't make me want to impale myself on a very large, very sharp knife, it certainly doesn't make me want to listen to it again, either.

- Charles Monaco