Album Review: Lou Reed - Coney Island Baby

Coney Island Baby was released at the end of 1975, the follow up to Lou Reed’s aggressively noisy Metal Machine Music.  This album couldn’t be further away, his band, including ex-Velvet Underground bass player Doug Yule, create a warm, melodic collection of songs.

The lyrical message across this album is of Reed’s blissful love life.  Opening with the chiming keyboards of Crazy Feeling, the lyrics are peppered with references to his love interest Rachel (“and you, you really are a queen, oh such a queen”).  The strutting, skipping guitars of Charley’s Girl follow before the guitars add a little bite on a slowed-down version of VU tune She’s My Best Friend (guess who).

The album takes a sharp left as, unhappy with this gooey softness, the Lou Reed street persona reappears on Kicks, a murderous tale of getting thrills from violence (“when the blood comes down his neck, don’t you know it was way better than s€x”) as snatches of conversation swoop in and out, creating a most unsettling atmosphere which threatens to completely spoil the mood.

A Gift follows, where Reed sings tongue-in-cheek lyrics about being “just a gift to the women of this world” over soothing, strummed guitars and dippy pipes.  After two relatively throwaway songs, the sighing guitars of the title track are a fitting end to the album.  Here Reed recites a possibly autobiographical (hard to tell though as the man lies constantly) tale from his childhood of high school days and sports try-outs over a wonderful melody.  Some of the lyrics hark back to his edgier past (“all your two-bit friends, they’ve gone and ripped you off”), culminating in Reed cooing about the “glory of love…. man, I swear I’d give the whole thing up for you”.  It sounds quite wonderful, though it’s so far removed from Heroin, Waiting for the Man and Berlin that it’s hard to take it 100% at face value.  Nonetheless it’s probably the most tuneful Lou Reed album.

Album Review: Sugar - File Under: Easy Listening

Album number three for Bob Mould's Sugar came out in 1994. It's a heavy guitar rush, especially the almost MBV-isms of opening track Gift, but underneath there are some very relaxed, almost poppy melodies. Tracks like Your Favourite Thing and the Replacements-ish Believe What You're Saying are as poppy as anything in the indie-pop canon.

Bassist David Barbe gets to do vocals on the hard-rocking Company Book, and there are plenty of rock anthems here like the almost Heroes-like What You Want It To Be. Panama City Motel borrows some of the chords from Beaster's Come Around, while the acoustic guitars of Can't Help You Anymore echo Copper Blue.

The album finishes with a Neil Young style guitar feast in Explode and Make Up. Oft-overlooked in favour of Copper Blue, this album deserves a listen in its own right.

Album Review: Mark Hollis

This was the only solo album released by Mark Hollis, once of Talk Talk. Released in 1998, it takes the musical direction forged by Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock to a more minimalist and sparse setting.

The album doesn’t represent a major departure from these, as the 8 songs contained within are all framed by Hollis’ fragile, quivering voice. After 20 seconds of silence, opening track The Colour of Spring starts off sounding reasonably conventional before retreating in on itself with a beautifully quiet Satie-esque piano part. It’s like REM’s Everybody Hurts turned inside out and stripped down to bare bones. Watershed is more fleshed out, with more instruments but never so much that the instruments overwhelm the music with each individual instrument line given a chance to breathe in this setting. The merest flaws, strings squeaking and background noise can be picked out in these songs.

Inside Looking Out is rather sombre, almost forbidding. You nearly hold your breath listening to songs like these, as if even breathing could disturb the mood. Hollis sings in a gossamer-like voice words which are not lyrics in the conventional sense but more impressionistic (“left no life no more”). The song is dominated by the sparsest of piano progressions, with a little guitar and keyboards here and there, and production so bare you can here occasional creaks here and there. It’s breathtaking.

The Gift is busier, along the lines of Watershed, and tinged with regret with some wonderful acoustic guitar peeking in and out of the track before ending with woodwind. A Life (1895-1915) opens with clarinet and is light years away from conventional rock music, with parts of it very silent indeed, until after 3 minutes a piano part enters to carry the song for 2 minutes, along with some spectral backing vocals.

Westward Bound has a ratcheting guitar figure along the lines of Runeii from Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, while The Daily Planet reaches back further (after a cor anglaise opening) to Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden album. Guitar, some lovely piano and harmonica blend together to create a muted epic.

Final track, A New Jerusalem is the sound of music being put away. Funereal in tempo, it’s blissfully bleak. The album finishes as it starts, with silence. It takes an age to get into this album, but it does reward. This really is a modern form of that age old genre, the blues. However it’s hard to see where Hollis can go from here, and I understand he has retired from the music business.