| New Music 09: The Heavy Hitters |
[Mar. 3rd, 2009|03:02 pm] |
As part of my ongoing new year's resolution to engage with music more in 2009, I have to listen to an awful lot of shash perpetrated by people who should probably know better. None of the following three albums is in my top ten of year so far, which means they are extremely unlikely to make my all-important festive fifty at decade end, but here are my impressions of the efforts of the Big Names thus far in 2009:
Bruce Springsteen, having 3 entries in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and 2 in the Pitchfork 500: "Working On A Dream" seems like a pretty bad title, but once you listen to the eight-minute shaggy dog story that is album opener "Outlaw Pete" and hugely overblown profession of love for a checkout girl in "Queen of the Supermarket" it's obvious that Bruce is feeling, if not quite hilarious, at least impish: tongue firmly in cheek, he's going through the Springsteen motions without feeling any need to (once again) write the Great American Album. He wasn't ever the Boss of me - I only really relate to him through a Badly Drawn Boy cover of "Thunder Road" and Ballboy doing "Born In The USA", both of which I still think are greatly superior to the originals. But the man is statesmanlike here and everything on the record is completely listenable. Plus The Wrestler (song) was cheated at the Oscars, and should have won Best Song, if only because The Wrestler (movie) should have won everything at the Oscars, being like twenty times as good as Slumdog Millionaire.
U2, having 2 songs in the Pitchfork 500 and a whopping 6 in Rolling Stone's list: now don't get me wrong, I don't completely hate U2. I do rather like "One", though I wish they'd stopped before they got to two. But even by U2 standards "No Line On The Horizon" is a stinker, reminiscent of being trapped in the corner by a coked-up fiftysomething bore at a really dull party where the only thing on the stereo is the hoariest old MOR imaginable. Perhaps U2 sensed this when they decided to rope in Brian Eno for a sonic tune-up, but maybe he's a coked-up fiftysomething bore by this stage as well. Anyway, save yourself the trouble of wading through this sludge, download at most the eponymous opening track which has its moments and maybe first single "Get On Your Boots", if you can sit through Bono asserting "I don't wanna talk about wars between nations, not right now, sexy boots, get on your boots!", thus simultaneously implying that his other job is as a relevant political force and sounding like a complete idiot, without throwing up.
Morrissey, having 2 songs at the Rolling Stone but 4 in the vastly more important Pitchfork 500, so suck it Bono: I think I love Morrissey slightly more than my own dad, but it's pretty much a given these days that each "new" album will be 40% petulant carping about high court judges and 40% adolescent posturing that no one could ever love him. But apart from being about to enter a record-breaking fifth decade of being a teenager, Morrissey uses "Years of Refusal" to wrestle with his own mortality in a fairly entertaining way. I don't think there's a truly great Morrissey song to be found here, though there's a hilarious bit at the end of "You Were Good In Your Time" where Moz sings "are you aware wherever you are that you have just died" - at which point the track abruptly launches into two minutes of scary Silent Hill style rumblings, moanings, sinister whale noises and incomprehensible foreign voices emanating from the next room. Apparently Morrissey thinks the afterlife will sound like a Swans song! |
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| Comments: |
No Line On The Horizon is... well, you know how in all good British Sci-fi, sooner or later something drains all the life force out of something, leaving a soulless husk that crumbles to dust as soon as it is disturbed. If you did that to music, you'd be left with No Line On the Horizon. It's genuinely the first time U2 have put out an album where not only do I not want to listen to any of it again, I don't really recall listening to it the first time. I remember the overwhelming sense of boredom and desolation, but I couldn't whistle you a note of it. Truly, less interesting than silence.
heartened by your description of the new Springsteen, as so far Radio2's attempts make me fall in love with "Working On a Dream" have failed.
i saw U2 play a song at the end of Jonathon Ross last week. i remember it being really awful and sounding like someone else, but i can't remember who (or what it sounded like).
i imagine i'll get the Morrissey regardless of write-ups.
i still haven't heard the new springsteen, how rubbish is that? though i will take issue at the irritating twee of ball or badlydrawn boy being as magical as bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuce. and that the wrestler is 20 times better than slumdog. maybe 3 times.
I drank way too much wine before bed and dreamed of you last night! But then it devolved into a dream about hundreds of multicoloured dayglo caterpillars streaking driveway of my grandparents' house like silly string. I blame it all on spring being in the air.
Springsteen, by contrast, dreams of being asked to join the lineup of Ballboy.
My own eagerness to engage with current music stops well short of continuing to indulge U2 and Morrissey, or anyone else who's traded on their past success to crank out self-indulgent toss for the last decade -- although I was thinking about giving the Bruce a listen. So I admire your dedication. But don't you feel a bit of life has been sucked out of you?
I like Springsteen a lot, thought his last album was great, but this is one of those rather leaden efforts he produces from time to time which leave me cold. And 'The Wrestler' is possibly the worst thing he's ever done - the 'That's you that is' sketches of Newman & Baddiel recast as a self-pitying monologue.
I don't think The Wrestler is an *amazing* song or anything, it just gains a lot of reflected glory in my head from the movie. Unlike most of the stuff on, say, the U2 album, it doesn't make me want to throw furniture at it. (Maybe, given the movie, it should...) | |
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