Goodbye Girl, Girl Goodbye

TOTO, voted America's Sexiest Band 1982

A while ago I penned a review of the top ten songs on Spotify called 'Hourglass', prompted by a phase where I was listening to the Squeeze song almost obsessively. Undoubtedly, the format was a crashing failure, and I've never returned to that particular puddle of vomit...until today. We're back, baby!

This time around, it's TOTO's incredible 'Girl Goodbye' that's been getting the juices flowing. For those of you uninitiated to the pleasures of melodic rock, TOTO were the mightiest of musos, virtually carrying the entire US AOR industry on its back during the late 1970s and early 1980s. As well as massive songs like 'Hold The Line', 'Rosanna' and 'Africa', its constituent members guested on any number of smooth classics in the yacht rock wheelhouse; the discography section of drummer Jeff Porcaro's Wikipedia page is quite something to behold. 

The great thing about 'Girl Goodbye' is that not only does it retain TOTO's trademark facility with a soaring chorus, but it's got some attitude and aggression to it that one doesn't readily associate with the band. It got me thinking - there must be plenty of other kiss-off songs with the words 'girl' and 'goodbye' in the title, so I've fired up Spotify and given 'em a listen. 

Artist: TOTO

Song: 'Girl Goodbye'
Rivals both Boney M's 'Rasputin' and Squeeze's 'Hourglass' as the greatest song ever recorded. Singer Bobby Kimball is all over this piece; curiously, the lyrics fall into a strange yacht rock preoccupation of being a bad-ass criminal on the run, a la Boz Scaggs' 'Lido Shuffle' and Christopher Cross' 'Ride Like the Wind'. Sample lyrics:

Yeah I'm out on the run,
Got some heat, got a gun

Objectively very cool stuff I'm sure you'll agree. What's 'heat' doing here, I wonder? If it's the 'heat' that comes from police attention, fair enough; but it's a reference to a firearm, it's a tautology because he mentions that very fact in the next breath.

Oh there's smoke in the air,

And there's blood everywhere

But I'm hoping that the white man don't recognise me

Look pal, you're in TOTO - I say this as a man of almost spectral pallor, but if there's one thing us white people recognise and love, it's this kind of overblown bullshit pomp-rock! Nonetheless, this slams, Steve Lukather plays some cool riffs and I like the keyboard at the start. 10/10

Artist: Squeeze
Song: 'Goodbye Girl'
Making their second appearance in this format, it's Squeeze. And it's the usual wide-eyed kitchen-sink earnestness from these boys. This time, Squeeze are not ditching their old lady to make a run for the border, no - true to form, they're the sadsacks left on their lonesome, getting robbed for good measure. It's charming pop-rock with a percussion track that sounds like a commuter train pulling into a station with a short platform. 7/10

Artist: Go West

Song: 'Goodbye Girl'
This features one of the most horrendous synth tones ever devised. I wouldn't be surprised if it was initially perfected as part of a secret non-lethal weapons programme. Anyway, it crawls along with all the energy of an arthritic snail, but I have to concede the vocals are good and there is a little bit of wobbly Mick Karn / Pino Palladino style fretless bass, which made me laugh. 4/10

Artist: David Gates
Song: 'Goodbye Girl'
Yup, it's the guy from Bread - I suppose TOTO owe him and his ilk for popularising a brand of mature soft-rock with a focus on chorus hooks and high production values. This is exactly as I had imagined it - a pretty soppy piano 'n' strings ballad with, yes, a big chorus hook. Gates sounds like a schlub, which actually works well given the context. It's okay. 6/10

Artist: Broadcast
Song: 'Goodbye Girls'
The most impressive thing about this slice of lo-fi postmodernism is that they get the word 'counterparts' into the lyrics. The vocals are faux-naif psychedelic, the electronics sound like a fax machine performing an extended death scene. Decent, I suppose, if that brand of hauntology floats your boat. 5/10

Artist: Luke Bryan

Song: 'Goodbye Girl'

Some 'cry into your whiskey' country corn-pone here courtesy of Mr Bryan. This kind of music sounds almost focus-grouped; just enough lap steel to offer a patina of regional authenticity, a lolloping pace entirely fit for such a mournsome subject and a vocals that conjure up a regular ol' boy who's tough, but hurtin'. In other words, the most horribly banal Nashville conveyor belt pabulum imaginable. 2/10

Artist: Rumer

Song: 'Goodbye Girl'
Does this have both a zither and a harmonica on it? That's neat. A little nondescript in the verses, but Rumer has a voice suited to confessional, intimate music, and the chorus is rather lovely, nodding as it does to the girl group sound of the Ronettes. Not bad! 7/10

Artist: Peter Criss
Song: 'Kiss The Girl Goodbye'

So it's KISS' very own street fightin' man on his first solo album here (which coincided of debut solos from the other three members of the hottest band in the world). I recall reading, once upon a time, that Criss considered his voice analogous to Rod Stewart; yeah, perhaps whilst he was getting his stomach pumped. What a fucking mess this is; this is like a Big Star ballad being played by a band who have never heard Big Star before. 1/10

Artist: Art Farmer

Song: 'Goodbye, Old Girl'
When I saw the song title I thought to myself, "is this going to be about a horse?". It's not; rather, it's trumpet player Art Farmer blowing a sweet, warm and emotional slow jazz number. It's a joy to hear this kind of unfiltered, in-the-moment playing, both from Farmer but also his pianist accompanist, who creates a bed of twinkling arpeggios for the lead instrument to ease back into. Beautiful. 9/10

Artist: Aaron Watson

Song: 'Kiss That Girl Goodbye'
What did I give the Luke Bryan number? Two out of ten? Well, it's twice as good as this noisy bro-country slurry. I once endured a nine-hour drive from Colorado to Kansas where the radio station was permanently tuned to this kind of dogshit, and I swear I could feel my IQ dropping in real time. At least Bryan tries to connect with some semblance of human emotion; this is eighty percent proof moonshine nihilism, and seems to revel in the fact. 1/10 for somewhat resembling music.

There's your lot - of course, TOTO emerge triumphant, but I could listen to that Art Farmer track again and again, plus I was pleasantly surprised by Rumer's offering in the 'goodbye girl / girl goodbye' stakes. Perhaps I'll give this format another go sometime? Maybe one day I'll actually make an entertaining fist of it? Who can say?

Fire And Ice - Yngwie Malmsteen

Provenance: Fucking hell. Suffice to say that we all go through some awkward phases in our adolescence, and one of mine was a fleeting interest in shred. 

I confess, I wanted to play guitar like Satriani, Vai and Malmsteen, at one stage at least. Perhaps I was infected with a relatively benign precursor to Covid-19 as I certainly experienced an extreme lack of taste in order to walk into HMV, see this on the shelves and think to myself, "that'll do for me."

Even back then, green around the gills as I was, I had an inkling that Malmsteen had a hint of farce about him. Prior to being unmasked as a particularly charmless air passenger, there was the braggadocio about his own abilities, his disparagement of other fine guitarists and his ludicrous stage-hogging. 

But he can sure burn it up on the fretboard, right?

Review: I haven't listened to this for many, many years in the belief that it is doubtless garbage, and - surprise, surprise - I am right. Released in 1992, the tail-end of the butt-rock era, it has the sonics and clarity of an album produced ten years prior. Before I go any further, I would like to reproduce Malmsteen's personal thanks entry from the sleeves notes in full. I think these shed much light on the whole endeavour:

Yngwie Malmsteen's personal thanks to: Erika Malmsteen, Lennart & Lolo Lannerback, Fuzzy, Peter, 'Putte' Rooth, Guilio Lomma [sic], Nicolo Paganini [sic], J.S. Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jimi Hendrix, H.P. Lovecraft, Enzo Ferrari, Leo Fender, Dinsdale, Monty Python's Flying Circus and to all his family and friends.

What an absolutely marvellous porridge this is; and we shall come back to the principals in a moment, but there's a glaring omission here if influences are being reeled off. Where is Ritchie Blackmore? Surely one cannot produce what is essentially a bad Rainbow album, albeit one juiced to the gills on steroids, without a tip of the hat to the Man in Black? Fire And Ice is essentially the first three Rainbow albums sped up, with less interesting guitar playing, and a complete absence of the charm that made that trilogy so exceptional. So, power metal, essentially.

Credit should be given where due, and I am thankful that Fire And Ice is an attempt at squeezing Malmsteen's electro-baroque sensibilities into band format; much like Steve Vai's (admirable) Sex And Religion, we have a singer present to give shape and meaning to all the twiddling. Furthermore, the fellow in question - Goran Edman, a kind of throat-for-hire - does sterling work. It cannot save the material, naturally, much as one strong swimmer cannot tow a freighter into port, but he does a manful job nonetheless.

What we're left with, then, is a melange of Rainbow, Magnum, Stratovarius and a clutch of other bands that see merit in rhyming 'fire' with 'desire' and wailing away on harmonic minor scales (so, power metal, essentially). Where Jimi Hendrix figures in this whole farrago one can only speculate, but if Malmsteen is laughing into his sleeve at 'forgetting' Blackmore ('How Many Miles To Babylon', really?), the more deceased of his influences come through loud and clear. Boy howdy.

I am not a good musician, and as such I think I would find it a tough yomp trying to build a metal song around, say, a Bach fugue. This trickiness is untroubling to Herre Malmsteen, who cuts the Gordian knot by simply stopping the song in its tracks so we can hear some fruity organ work. It is distracting and tonally illiterate in 'Cry No More' and 'C'est La Vie'; at least he has the restraint(!!) to only bamboozle the listener for a few bars of this guff in fizzy AOR radio-bait 'Teaser'. Hey, what do I know? I ain't never had no number one album in Japan.

We should come to the soloing. It's all reheated Bach 'n' Paganini I'm afraid. Blackmore was, to my mind, the first to popularise neo-classical soloing in heavy rock and metal, but Malmsteen is the one who has really picked up the baton and run with it. But to where? He is undoubtedly a master at playing all these baroque and romantic scales incredibly quickly, but it's almost as if he's boxed himself into a corner. Taste, musicality, moderation are all sacrificed to a frightening, but ultimately banal, demonstration of speed and technicality. Malmsteen is not quite as incontinent a guitarist as double haircut-haver Michael Angelo Batio, but on a track like 'Forever Is A Long Time' (stupendous title) he runs Nitro's finest close.

Highlights? Yeah, there are a couple. Literally, two. After the snorefest of instrumental introduction 'Perpetual', the first track to feature vocals, 'Dragonfly', is pretty decent melodic metal. At the halfway mark, title track 'Fire And Ice' achieves something utterly absent on the rest of the album - a catchy chorus hook. It's a good track! Sad, then, that the album sags with the preposterousness of 'Forever Is A Long Time', and then takes a swan dive off a bridge with 'I'm My Own Enemy' (never a truer word spoken, etc.) which sounds like the Michael Schenker Group (drunken edition) in slow motion.

It's hard to truly loathe Fire And Ice, however. Much like its creator, it's a bombastic, strutting popinjay of an album, all surface and no depth, but it doesn't try to pretend to be anything it's not. I do want to be a little more charitable, truly. But then I hear a fucking lute on some dog awful shit called 'Golden Dawn', remember that Eddie Van Halen is dead but Malmsteen lives, and that I always have the option of listening to Helloween or Savatage.