This Week: Lucinda's schtick, satirical rap, and those damn French.
Lucinda Williams
World Without Tears (Lost Highway)
"Baby, see how I been living," Lucinda Williams sings on the first track of her new album. "Velvet curtains on the windows to/ keep the bright and unforgiving/ light from shining through." She ain't kidding. Over the course of World Without Tears, Lucinda loses one lover after another, takes a lot of long lonely drives, and generally makes a mess of things.
Even in the good times, like the relentlessly sexy "Righteously," she always sounds like she's on the verge of losing it. Of course, she loves that verge, the margin between love and loss, between life and jumping off a Lake Charles bridge. But at this point, she's mapped it pretty thoroughly, and World Without Tears suffers from familiarity. What felt honest and revelatory even as recently as her last album, Essence, begins to seem tiresome this time out.
There's also a paucity of great tunes. A handful of tracks linger—"Ventura," "Those Three Days," even the guttural rocker "Atonement"—but too many of the rest are lesser versions of past glories. Still, she's a knock-'em-dead singer—she's mastered the moan as a vocal form possibly more convincingly than any other white woman ever (and that includes Janis, who was more of a screamer than a moaner). A few stabs at rappish delivery work better than you'd think, or are at least less embarrassing than most such efforts by middle-aged rockers.
There's nothing particularly wrong with World Without Tears, but there's nothing particularly interesting about it either. Lucinda's still living out the template she set way back with Happy Woman Blues. It still works—but, like so many other things, not as well as it used to. She might want to think about opening those drapes.
—Jesse Fox Mayshark
Gravy Train!!!
Hello Doctor (Kill Rock Stars)
It's so hard to find really good rap music. A good shot in the arm for the run-of-the-mill self-aggrandizing love/hate letters one normally hears on the radio or sees on the Billboard charts, Hello Doctor is medicine for pop rap. Naughty words are set to buzzing keyboards and organs, clumsy drum machines and other interesting bits of sound. The four young hedonists that comprise Gravy Train!!! focus on lust and gluttony as if they had nothing else to live for: "I'm such a slut I've tried everything/ I've choked down six dix while eatin' Burger King."
Their most popular associate, and equally as theatrical, would be Peaches, the Canadian electronic artist who helped break this musical style. But while Peaches generally sticks with blatant sexual vulgarities, spoken with aloof nonchalance, Gravy Train!!!'s staccato shouting matches are more suited to irony and clever childish rhymes than arty pretensions. Any fan of Peaches' satirical rap-anthem, "Fuck The Pain Away," will be equally happy with Gravy Train!!!'s "Burger Baby," where Chunx's hunger for food is equal to her desire for screwing, becoming knocked up by a burger and demanding an abortion.
Another high point of the album is the modernized vaudevillian routine of "You Made Me Gay," in which Hunx and Chunx trade barbs after a disastrous sexual escapade.
Punk rock hardly exists now except in reissues of once relevant albums, but punk rap may offer salvation to those who have lost interest in the world of so-called independent music. Times change, but as the back of the "Menz" 12" proudly proclaims, "File under: The bitches of 80s rap!"
—Travis Gray
Miss Kittin
Radio Caroline, Volume 1 (Emperor Norton Records)
The most heartening thing about the burst of anti-French fervor in recent months was the American rediscovery that there actually is a place called France, full of French people. I don't expect this mild awakening of international consciousness to last long—Jacques Chirac is already taking a backseat in the national psyche to Laci Peterson—but anyone so inclined might take it as an excuse to check out what exactly those Old Europeans are up to.
Dancing, as it turns out. Producers,
DJs and bedroom computer geniuses from Bristol to Berlin have spent the better part of the past few decades inventing, reinventing and endlessly remixing assorted forms of electronic music. This hasn't gone exactly unnoticed in America—think of all those car commercials—but it's hard to get a sense here of the scene's cultural force and impact abroad.
Miss Kittin, a French DJ (née Caroline Herve) who came to international prominence a few years back with the club hit "Frank Sinatra" (a track centered around her deadpan Gallic voice intoning, "Kiss my ass...suck my dick...") and who has collaborated with fellow scene stars like Felix Da Housecat and Golden Boy, offers as good a starting point as any with her first mix CD. Radio Caroline Volume 1 weaves together some of her favorite tracks from the past 10 years or so, heavy on continental influences (the Finnish Pan(a)sonic, the Italian Alexander Robotnick, several glassy-eyed Germans) but with nods to Chicago house pioneer Marshall Jefferson and the U.K.'s ominous Autechre (here represented by the relatively gentle "Flutter"). Kittin herself pops into the mix occasionally to ponder life and sex and DJing.
All very a la mode, as they say you-know-where, but it's also pretty gentle stuff. Perfect accompaniment for loft parties—to go along with the Birth of a Nation Bordeaux and Captain America Camembert.
—Jesse Fox Mayshark
March 8, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 19
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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