Newspaper Page Text
December 4, 1991
Flagpole Magazine
Page 17
Single Issues
Love Child (A)
7" EP/Trash Flow
Imagine the Ramones with more than three chords,
more dimensionality, and add a penchant for dissonance,
and you’d wind up with something close to Love Child. All
six songs surge with a minimalist primal pop mentality that’s
hard not to like. The standouts are the songs written and
sung by bassist Rebecca Odes, plus guitarist Alan Licht's
“Know It’s Alright." Also worth a mention is "Crocus Says.”
a tribute to Pere Ubu’s David Thomas consisting of spliced
lyrics from various Ubu songs. Love Child does have a case
of terminal cuteness, but they add just the right bit of
haphazardness to prevent themselves from falling into a
rut. Good cover art by NY noisemeister Rudolph Grey.
Monsterland (6)
“Get Out Of My Head” EP / Rockville
A decent debut single from a trio from somewhere or the
other. Thing is. the a-side is jangle-rock hell. The flipside's
two songs are pretty impressive, with a great garage
sound, helped out immensely by recording on a four-track
The best band to come out on Rockville in a good while
Worth a good listen.
Halo Of Flies (A)
“Human Fly” b/w Tm A Bug" / Chro-Mo bootleg
Originally released on Forced Exposure Records in
1989. that disc promptly sold out, and two years later
someone decided to make blatantly illegal copies of it. The
sound ain't quite up to the original, though it's still fairly
clear. "Human Fly" is a straight cover of the Cramps song,
but HOF’s cover of the Urinals' “I'm A Bug" will totally shred
your speakers. It’s the perfect song to test a new stereo
with. Included on this boot, with I don’t think was released
on the original single though I could be wrong, is the studio
version of "Ballad Of Extreme Hate." A good throw-in, but
the officially released live version is a great deal better. The
price of this 7" is way up there, so only Halo devotees will
find this of interest.
Josh Houk
U2 Re-invent Themselves
After 20 or so
times in the CD player
Achtung Baby has
gone aufweidershein
to the used record
store. The music
does tend to swirl and
paint ecstatic aural
kiosks at times, but
overall the album
lacks... something.
Ha! Could it be U2?
The band stated in
the recent issue of
Rolling Stone that “it
was good if a song
took you on a journey or made you think your hi-fi was
broken, bad if it reminded you of recording studios or U2.'
Yes, they accomplished just that, but to what end and why?
There have been other artists who have “changed’ their
styles of music over the last year, but the soul of the per
former is still intact, the personality of the musicians still
comes out. Why do U2 feel they have to remove even that
part of themselves? Or has it been a farce all along 0 So, this
is a double-barralled review, an elegy of sorts for a band
that once raised our spirits and had a great impact on alter
native music in the '80s
Part 1
U2 — Achtung Baby (Island/PLG)
There's no question in my mind that U2 have the ability
to transcend musical boundaries But at the moment they're
on a musical field trip. Since the making of Rattle and Hum,
U2 took three years before releasing Achtung Baby — a
step inside the industrial wasteland of love with Berlin as the
backdrop. Yet, for what U2 have accomplished in the past
this falls short of their brilliance.
The album is produced flawlessly (Brian Eno & Daniel
Lanois) but even with such studio masters tweaking the
knobs there’s no saving U2's plummet into the dark re
cesses of industrialized sonic landscapes.
Achtung Baby is a highly polished product in respect to
its instrumental arrangements adding strings in integral
places, electronic whizzes, bangs, clangs and plenty of
distorted edgy (pun intended) guitars. To some extent, the
overuse of industrial madness is exasperating and aggra
vating. U2's music has always been, to me, even in their
lesser creative moments, uplifting Achtung Baby is a
burden to listen to, tiring and easily followed up on the
stereo with almost anything else — the Pixies Trompe Le
Monde for instance.
Island records is marketing Achtung Baby to an alterna
tive audience hoping to hit U2’s fan base without over-
hypmg the album. Chris Blackwell, CEO and founder of
Island Records(f), stated in the November 16 issue of
Billboard magazine that he thinks Achtung Baby\s the best
U2 album yet. Evidently, he's never listened to The Joshua
Tree
I say U2 are ca
pable of better,
though most alterna
tive music listeners
gave up on U2 long
ago, and for mostly
the wrong reasons.
You can't judge a
band from their man
agers’ ability to mar
ket their music,
MTV's crude capac
ity to run a band into
the ground or the rec
ord company's over
use of the publicity
campaign. U2 have blown off the halos, thrown out their
spiritual image and are entering the '90s with an experi
mental approach. It's healthy, necessary and, damn, it's
only rock n’ roll in the end anyway.
Hillary Meister
Part 2
U2 — Achtung Baby (Island/PLG)
Bono seems to have lost the ability to write interesting or
deeply meaningful lyrics. Reading the CD booklet is not a
pleasant experience for someone like myself, who has
admired the focused, poetic beauty of songs like “A Sort of
Homecoming" and "One Tree Hill." What he could do with
few words in the bonechillmg “Exit," he can't come close to
in many more lines on the new songs. Can this be the same
man who once wrote: "in the heart of darkness there's a
firezone where poets speak their hearts and bleed for it..."?
Personal relationships are important, but they are not
the only important thing in the world, and I expected U2 to
go beyond love and lust (and there is an annoying under
supply of lust, too) in an album that took so long to make.
Not that an album of love songs can’t be worthwhile, or even
extremely impressive, but these love songs are simply not
varied enough in their specific contents or perspectives to
raise them above the status of “mere" love songs. The
emotional landscape is too uniform to make the listener
want to explore it.
U2 minimizes their best traits, and thus flounders in the
over-crowded ocean of psyche/dance dullness. Larry Mullen
is a very good drummer, but one would never know it from
listening to this album His work is as uninspiring as that of
all those “Funky Drummer" plagensts from the Stone Roses
School of Predictable Percussion. Adam Clayton's bass
can't compensate for the lackluster drumming. The Edge is
the one member of the band who still seems to have what
made U2 great to begin with. His trademark echoes punc
ture the fabric of distorted chords in which they are wrapped
U2 gave me the superlative concert performance of my
life, not to mention many hours of audio pleasure outside
the concert hall, and for that I remain truly grateful. However,
Achtung Baby is as bad as the title, and I can't praise it out
of sentimental loyalty. Lisa McDonald
111.i I»1HB
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