This Week: Three hyped records find our critics annoyed, bored and seduced
Steve Earle
Jerusalem (Artemis)
I've grown to dislike Steve Earle over the last five years or so. I still think he's a brilliant storyteller. But he's tiresome as a political activist—even when I agree with him, I want him to shut up—and his artistic vision seems to have fossilized into brittle self-righteousness.
Take the opening verse of "John Walker's Blues," the controversial song that was a lightning rod in Nashville. "I'm just an American boy—raised on MTV/ And I've seen all those kids in the soda pop ads/ But none of them looked like me." There's a chance for an imaginative, empathetic portrayal of John Walker Lindh here; for Earle to start it with a cheap swipe at the pop marketplace seems inappropriate and small. The song as a whole is slightly ominous, but mostly forgettable. It feels like Steve Earle stepping up to his role as America's contrarian voice. (He describes himself in the liner notes as "the loneliest man in America," as if he's the only one who resents the country's rightward tilt in the last year.)
This is supposed to be Earle's political album. It's got politics, for sure—there's "John Walker's Blues," and he knocks HMOs and Wall Street and complacent ex-radicals, and on the title track he figures there will probably be peace in the Middle East someday, because "I don't remember learnin' how to hate in Sunday school." But it's disappointing as a political statement. For one thing, it's simple-minded, as the "Jerusalem" lyrics show. For another, the only response to the actual terrorist attacks that set much of this record in motion is on the first song, "Ashes to Ashes," and it seems to me cold and cynical and insufficient: "[E]very tower ever built tumbles/ No matter how strong no matter how tall."
Bruce Springsteen's The Rising isn't a great record, either, but it was a heartfelt and fairly spontaneous reaction to Sept. 11. Jerusalem isn't.
—Matthew Everett�
Beck
Sea Change (Geffen)
It always takes a few listens, but this is ridiculous. Four times I've listened to this album, and I still haven't committed myself to feeling one way or the other about it.
I knew this wasn't going to be an Odeley or Midnite Vultures:no hip-hop inflected licks, nothing for my party mixes. And I was OK with that. I nestled happily into "The Golden Age," a nighttime-driving song with hints of Wilco in the eerie upslide of guitars like wheeling birds. But from that alluring opening, the song rolls away, leaving its listener at a dusty truckstop. "Paper Tiger" crooks its finger in a similarly seductive pose, attempting to lure its audience in with a barely-there bass and a sudden influx of strings. But Beck's voice trudges on with neither direction nor animation.
Now, on my fifth listen, I'm starting to get what bothers me. As my CD player clicks from track to track, I feel strangely dislocated twinges of anticipation. Where on a great album I would welcome the appearance of each new song, here I welcome moments: the long-delayed one-line chorus of "Guess I'm Doing Fine," a counterpoint in words and piano; the atonal chords that open "Sunday Sun" or the cloud-borne sighs of its refrain, recalling hints of Bowie. Many of the best moments are just as borrowed, or more so—the xylophone-like electronic chimes of "It's All In Your Mind" are surely the work of producer Nigel Godrich, who also guided Radiohead's OK Computer. Rather than urging me to replay Beck's composition, the accents just made me want to put on "No Surprises." I might just go do that now.
—Tamar Wilner
Low
Trust (Kranky)
Things that haven't changed much since the last Low album: husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker still write slow, dirgey lullaby melodies with foreboding elliptical lyrics; they still draw heavily from the well of the Velvet Underground; they still inflect their music with a Midwestern severity and sobriety that makes it impossible not to mention their Mormonism at least once in an album review; and they can still make lovely noise.
Things that have changed since the last Low album: the mix—Tchad Blake of the Latin Playboys works the boards and adds some industrial thump and drone to the customary hush; the guest appearances—Gerry Beckley of horse-with-no-namers America shows up, although not so's you'd notice; the song titles—even if they didn't have great songs to go with them, it'd be hard not to like "In the Drugs," "John Prine," "(That's How You Sing) Amazing Grace" or "La La Song" (which is as close to giddy as Low has ever gotten).
What really distinguishes Trust is the band's continuing evolution as songwriters and arrangers. They make good use of the broadened sonic possibilities suggested by Blake. The shimmering "Tonight" evokes White Album-era Beatles, "Snowstorm" uses sleigh bells and thundering drums to build a sonic blizzard, and the seven-minute epic "I Am the Lamb" is a fuzztone Gregorian chant. Moralistic they may be—when Sparhawk sings, "We always get what we deserve," it's a threat as much as a promise—but asceticism has rarely sounded so seductive.
—Jesse Fox Mayshark
October 24, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 43
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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