Curse Of The Hidden Mirror - Blue Oyster Cult

 

Provenance: I am the world's biggest Blue Oyster Cult fan (fight me), and bought this the very day it came out in the UK.

Review: Coming only three years after Heaven Forbid, I had hoped that Curse of the Hidden Mirror was a continuance of momentum that might see BOC release new studio material at a stately but steady pace. Well, I was wrong on that front - this release, on the final day of my GCSEs, would be their last until The Symbol Remains emerged last year, a gap of almost twenty years.

At the time that Curse... came into my possession I was deep into my BOC obsession; if Eric Bloom farted into a bathtub I would've considered it genius. I also recall defacing my parents' car with a Curse... bumper sticker, much to my dad's chagrin. You must understand, valued reader, that as a daydreaming sixteen year-old Blue Oyster Cult were a galaxy of music unto themselves. I would listen to Secret Treaties or Tyranny and Mutation and imagine myself an inductee into some kind of eldritch confederacy, a cabal of initiates who could tease out dark themes and cryptic signifiers from the music. I now realise how insane this all sounds. However, for a couple of years or so, in my little world, Blue Oyster Cult were The Truth.

Of course, exposure to new people, places, experiences and Steely Dan was to instil a degree of perspective into my worldview but I'm still, by most measures, a fanatic. Alongside the aforementioned Dan and Judas Priest, Blue Oyster Cult constitute the triumvirate of my own personal 'Big Three' artists. Nonetheless, the passage of time has mellowed me, and opened me up to all kinds of sounds I used to disdain (country music, for starters), which should grant me slightly more nuance in my assessments of their output.

The first thing that needs to be said is that, despite a title that acts as a callback to previous albums and the band's 'Imaginos' mythos, the qualities that made BOC so special in the mid-1970s are difficult to discern here (which has been the case, really, since Fire of Unknown Origin). Gone is the twisty, tumbling harmonic minor riffing and the oblique cod-Modernist poetry courtesy of the late Sandy Pearlman and Richard Meltzer. These elements are lamented, and I still don't think BOC ever properly recovered from the firing of drummer Albert Bouchard, their secret weapon with regards to both songwriting and infusing their sound with a light, jazzy sensibility on percussion.

What we do have on Curse... is a slick band of highly talented players who have come up with a diverse and distinctive collection of songs. Yes, horror and fantasy lyrics are still in place, albeit a little more on the nose, less mysterious and arcane, but that's fine. And if the Cult no longer possess the juice that made their early run of releases so damn unique, it's been replaced with a whipcrack sharpness. The best news is that Buck Dharma, one of the most identifiable guitarists of any era, does not miss a beat. I am sure I'm repeating erstwhile Metallica bassist Jason Newstead's impression here, but when he said Dharma's playing "was like hot needles pushed into your ears", I recognised that immediately. Further: Dharma came from a musical background, and there's something of the horn player in his lead work. The pulses, the climbs, the internal rhythms all come from a bop consciousness, even if the modes he typically plays in doesn't (but neither does he really hang around much in the typical rock box of the minor pentatonic). Beautiful.

When it comes to sensibility, it's long been obvious that frontman Eric Bloom favours the heavier material, whilst Buck is the pop guy. That delineation is clear on Curse... with Bloom helming headbangers such as 'Showtime', 'Eye Of The Hurricane' and the excellent, brawling 'The Old Gods Return'. Meanwhile, Buck's sweeter singing style gives a light touch to the almost-power-pop single 'Pocket', lead track 'Dance On Stilts' and 'Here Comes That Feeling', the latter of which could've easily slipped into the Eddie Money catalogue without too many eyebrows being raised.

There are a couple of interesting departures here - Bloom sounds like he's having a whale of a time hamming it up on 'I Just Like To Be Bad', which takes its cues in the verses from mid-period Who; and 'Stone Of Love', a Buck composition that's been knocking around since the early 1980s, has a suggestion of the more Latin-influenced tracks by Love, albeit with resoundingly modern hard rock dynamics. There is, alas, one crap tune here, unfortunately appended to the end of the album - 'Good To Feel Hungry' sounds like an undeveloped studio groove that should've been left on the cutting room floor.

Still - for a band that's been ploughing its own peculiar furrow for the past fifty or so years (a mere forty when this came out), Curse... sounds much hungrier, much livelier than it had any right to do. Okay, so perhaps vampiric skull-grin creepiness remains only in homeopathic memory, but thankfully we've got Ghost, who these days do a fabulous, classic BOC tribute act, so I'm happy. And I'm happy with Curse... too, a superlative hard rock record that crackles with verve, energy and no little craft.

Safe As Milk - Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band

 

Provenance: My Dad is a big Zappa fan, so as a consequence had a couple of Beefheart releases that included some degree of Zappa participation - the joint Zappa/Beefheart album Bongo Fury and the Zappa-produced Beefheart release Trout Mask Replica.

Nevertheless, I came to Beefheart fairly late, and mostly through reading about him. I think I needed this primer, because the one time I put Trout Mask Replica on as a teenager, I was left utterly flummoxed. Granted, I didn't have the most adventurous taste in music, and even now I am not sure as to whether I would derive much enjoyment from listening to it; TMR just seemed too wilfully weird.

Having read about it, I now think I'd get some appreciation at what was being attempted, and possibly its execution. But a few albums really caught my eye - Bat Chain Puller (Shiny Beast), Clear Spot and this, their debut - Safe As Milk. So now I own all three.

Review: On one level, and at least if you were only paying attention to the first three or four songs, you might be tempted to file it alongside the slew of other blues-rock bands emerging from both sides of the Atlantic during the mid-1960s; certainly, at the chewier end of the spectrum, but not a million miles from either the Pretty Things, Rising Sons or Canned Heat. 

Yet it's there from the very first moments; there's a slightly manic edge to the voice intoning "I was born in the desert / Came on up from New Orleans / Came upon a tornado / Sunlight in the sky." Those lyrics! They both hang together, and yet don't make much sense at all. And once the slide guitar gives way to the full band in clattering form, there's both a precision to the playing and a shiftiness where rhythm is concerned that sets it apart. 'Sure 'Nuff 'N Yes I Do' both sounds like the archetypal sixties bloozer and an observation of the genre through the proverbial looking glass.

There follows five more tracks of excellent, if twisted, takes on blues and pop in the period mould. Sometimes, such as on 'Dropout Boogie', the fuzz guitar and Beefheart's hyper-guttural vocal grant the music an air of snarling menace; on others, such as 'Zigzag Wanderer', the jingle-jangle of the Byrds is played with more swing and abandon than McGuinn, Hillman et al could ever muster. Then follows a trio of tracks so extraordinary that I don't think such a sequence was matched on any other release from 1967, and possibly thereafter.

First up is the electric jugband stomp of 'Electricity', Beefheart's strained, strangulated vocals stretching out atop the futuristic bore of a theremin. The theremin is both a perfect instrument to take the lead in a song titled 'Electricity', and also utterly incongruent with the hoedown jigging along behind it. It's mad, it shouldn't work, and of course it comes together.

Next is 'Yellow Brick Road', so saccharine you'd take pause before playing it to a diabetic, with cloying lyrics like "Bag of tricks and candy sticks / Peppermint kite for my toy." I vividly recall the first time I heard the chorus come crashing in, with the force and seeming heaviness of death metal, Beefheart's voice transformed from twee songster to the cavernous roar of an explosion in a mine shaft, "Yellow brick, black on black / Keep on walking and don't look back". Underneath, a roll of toms rumbles like thunder; at once, the tone is ominous, fearful and uncomfortable.  

Finally, the piece de resistance - 'Abba Zaba'. This one short track seems to contain all the music one could ever wish to hear. The lyrics seem to come from the Marc Bolan "hubcap diamond star halo" school of writing, yet conceptually come together to make more sense on an imagistic level than anything T.Rex ever accomplished. Simply put, 'Abba Zaba' sounds nothing like anything else going on at the time; the percussion alone, courtesy of John French, makes you wonder whether his DNA was spliced with octopus. I believe it was French who once described Ry Cooder's guitar over the third verse as "taking off like a bird, just floating over the melody", and it's spot on. All this whilst guitars whirr and crash, Beefheart and co. chanting about 'Babette Baboon'. 

Who else could've done this?

The rest of Safe As Milk contains stellar performances; the gritty, harmonica-driven 'Plastic Factory' sounding like a blueprint for Tom Waits' gnarlier moments and 'Grown So Ugly' turning the blues into math-rock. Yet none of this possesses the difficulty - and seeming obscurantism - of Trout Mask Replica. It's perfectly accessible pop music, if one accepts that a steady beat and tonal consistency don't have to be part and parcel of the deal. But Safe As Milk is much more than that - for me, it remains one of the most essential releases of the era, entirely identifiable with the experimentation of late 1960s acid rock and psychedelia yet almost a goad to other bands, as if to say "see? You can take it further and still make music people can sorta groove to." Tip top entertainment.

Hormonally Yours - Shakespears Sister

Provenance: This is another one I picked up off a school friend for about a quid.

I recall 'Stay' being a behemoth in the charts, but of equal importance to me was the bizarre playground rumour that Siobhan Fahey once checked into rehab for an addiction to fried chicken.

Besides, that's a cool cover! It's like Vivienne Westwood decided to style Lilian Gish or Theda Bara.

Review: You know, Shakespears Sister (sic) are playing down the road from me next month. I might go along.

Anyway, Hormonally Yours - called thusly because both Marcella Detroit (the tall one who wasn't in Bananarama) and Siobhan Fahey (ex-Bananarama) were pregnant during the making of the album. I shouldn't really be so flip about Detroit, who prior to Shakespears Sister performed as a backing vocalist for a couple of rock A-listers (Bob Seger, Eric Clapton) and wrote songs for many well-known artists, most notably 'Lay Down Sally', one of Slowhand's more bearable songs.

It's been ages since I've given Hormonally Yours a spin, and therefore doing so now feels like diving into an album for the first time. Two things strike me from the outset; one is that it's less spooky than I had assumed it would be (based on the archly gothic 'Stay' I suppose), and the other is that Marcella Detroit has a remarkable voice. At times she sings in the same range that Kate Bush used throughout much of The Kick Inside, but if anything there's more power and control behind these performances. It also contrasts splendidly with Fahey's delivery, which may not contain Detroit's technical fireworks but proves a warmer, more languid, more sensuous counterpoint.

Given their image and the 'Stay' fictional universe I imagined Fahey and Detroit inhabited, it's quite a surprise to hear that most of the first side of the album is pure power-pop - very, very good power pop. It takes its cues from Jellyfish and Redd Kross in some respects, and points towards the successful formula adopted by the post-millenial Cheap Trick in others. 'Goodbye Cruel World', 'My 16th Apology' and 'Are We In Love Yet' are simply fantastic, bouncing around the place with big chewy hooks and quirky little musical interpolations. I wanted to dislike 'Emotional Thing', as it starts off like a pale Was (Not Was) imitation, but I was won over eventually, not least of all by the incongruous blues harmonica that crops up halfway through.

Seeing as 'Stay' was such a blockbuster, I was half-expecting it to overshadow much of the other material. It's certainly meant as a compliment when I say that it doesn't stand out from the pack, other than as a change of pace. If it wasn't for its ubiquity, and my subsequent familiarity with it, 'Stay' would've just been another track I had reason to be excited about. It certainly is the most overtly goth-influenced thing on here, with a mid-section that sounds a wee bit Sisters of Mercy; the only other time I think 'ahhh, goth!' is in the chorus to 'Moonchild', which is disappointingly (for me) not a cover of Iron Maiden's best song. Even then, we're talking Gene Loves Jezebel goth, not Killing Miranda goth.

About the only misstep on Hormonally Yours is 'Black Sky', which has a slight Madchester vibe and a very dated house piano vibe. It's not terrible, and neither is 'Catwoman', which to these jaded old ears sounds like classic Shania Twain. It gets by, though, by being both utterly bonkers and by ending on a note that Detroit hits which caters to the hearing range of bats. On the other hand, props to Shakespears Sister for doing a song called 'Let Me Entertain You' that isn't a warm bath of shite.

Since giving Hormonally Yours a bash I'm left with a lingering shame that this album has lurked unloved at the bottom of my record collection for so long. It didn't deserve that fate, unlike some. Rather, Hormonally Yours is a catchy, weird, idiosyncratic jewel that cloaks its strangeness in an addictive pop-rock packaging. I think I'll be buying that ticket now.