Music & DVD Release Reviews
by Roy Trakin

- U2, No Line on the Horizon
- Miles Davis, Kind of Blue: Legacy Edition
- Brian Wilson live at the Wiltern Theatre,
That Lucky Old Sun
- Antony and the Johnsons, The Crying Light
- Jamey Johnson, That Lonesome Song

U2, No Line on the Horizon

(Interscope): “We will build, we will recover…and we will emerge stronger than before,” said Barack Obama in his speech before Congress, promising to lead us out of this economic and spiritual morass. “Every generation gets a chance to change the world,” sings Bono on “I’ll Go Crazy if I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” a song off U2’s new album, and he’s more than ready to seize the moment, too. In times of crisis, we look to our leaders for inspiration, a reason to carry on, to throw off our despair and believe we can make a difference. “Every day I have to find the courage/To walk out into the street,” declares Bono in the “Subterranean” free association of “Breathe” over a swirling kaleidoscopic melody, Larry Mullen Jr.’s tom-tom beat and The Edge’s proverbial guitar like ringing a bell. “Got a love you can’t defeat.” It seems like a while since we expected anything close to that from a mere rock band, but U2 take their mission to heart, maybe even too much so, if we are to believe the messianic Bono’s self-mocking claim: “The right to appear ridiculous is something I hold dear,” he sings in “I’ll Go Crazy…” In No Line on the Horizon, the band concentrates on what they do best, creating music that describes its genesis as “Head first, then foot/Then heart sets sail,” though just as often goes the opposite way (“My body’s now a begging bowl/That’s begging to get back, begging to get back/To my heart/To the rhythm of my soul/To the rhythm of my unconsciousness”). Like Obama’s entreaties to our better natures, U2’s latest is about saving ourselves first by doing what we do best. For Bono, it’s singing and making rock music. “I’ve found grace inside a sound,” he boasts in “Breathe,” and that is demonstrated more than once on Horizon’s lush, hi-def sonic architecture, constructed by longtime collaborators Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Steve Lillywhite, then underlined by bassist Adam Clayton’s throbbing boom. Just as one should never judge a book by its cover, Horizon teaches us not to jump to conclusions after the first two rather desultory tracks, the single, “Get On Your Boots,” and the album-opening title song, a bit of a letdown after the propulsive “Beautiful Day” and “Vertigo,” which led off the last two albums. Things do start to kick into gear with “Magnificent,” which lives up to its name as the kind of anthem we’ve come to expect from U2, a soaring breast-beater in the style of “Pride (In the Name of Love),” “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “I Will Follow,” with Bono declaring, “I was born to sing for you/I didn’t have a choice but to lift you up/And sing whatever song you wanted me to.” He realizes he’s not just the vessel for our hopes and dreams, but someone who has to fill that container up with the bittersweet nature of commitment: “Only love, only love can leave such a mark/But only love, only love unites our hearts.” “Moment of Surrender,” its gurgling church organ subliminally evoking the wedding day it describes, is a cross between the blue-eyed soul of “Sometimes I Can’t Make It on My Own” and “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” with the spiritual yearning of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” as it looks to pinpoint the instant where head gives way to heart, casually bringing that epiphany into the everyday, the sacred in the profane: “I was punching in the numbers at the ATM machine/I could see in the reflection/A face staring back at me.” The Edge’s bleating solos on “Unknown Caller” recall New York punk pioneers Television’s “Prove It,” a psychedelic middle-of-the-night vision with the singer playfully trying to get a word in edgewise: “Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak/Shush now.” The French horn is one of several Beatlesque touches on the album, as is the sawing “I am a Walrus” cello that closes “Breathe.” Given its placement at the exact midpoint of the album, the at-first-puzzling “Get on Your Boots” suddenly kicks in as a palate cleanser, a self-motivating punk-soul raver—part “Pump It Up,” part “Ball of Confusion”—which in the old days of vinyl would be the last track on side one. The grinding funk of “Stand Up Comedy” offers both a nod to World Trade Center tightrope walker and dreamer Philippe Petit (“The wire is stretched in between our two towers”) along with an admonition to follow your own dreams, not others’ versions of them (“Stand up to rock stars, Napoleon is in high heels/Josephine, be careful of small men with big ideas”), while the trippy “Fez—Being Born” has an arid, world beat Middle Eastern vibe attached to a stark existential journey, Antonioni’s The Passenger meets Babel. “White as Snow” offers a traditional arrangement attached to a mountain song with a delicate melody, a dramatic narrative and a desire for salvation: “If only a heart could be as white as snow.” The final, contemplative “Cedars of Lebanon” places us in the middle of a battle-scarred country dreaming of home, balancing imminent danger and a longing for domesticity, a deceptive calm before the storm, the harsh flip side to Bono’s insistence in “Boots,” “I don’t want to talk about wars between nations.” “This shitty world sometimes produces a rose,” he offers over the shifting sands of a shimmering, Eno/Harold Budd soundscape, which could just be a mirage. “The scent of it lingers and then it just goes.”  No Line on the Horizon offers us a chance to stop and smell that rose or hear that sound…if only for a fleeting moment, yet enough to keep us going, hoping it’ll turn out all right in the end. 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Miles Davis, Kind of Blue: Legacy Edition (Columbia/Sony Legacy): Hard to believe this album’s 50 years old. It sounds like it could’ve been recorded yesterday, and its stark melodies and modal improvisation ushered in a whole new era of conceptual mood music. Five tracks, 46 minutes worth of music, recorded over the course of two sessions seven weeks apart, with Miles on trumpet, leading a sextet that included legends
 Cannonball Adderley and Coltrane on alto and tenor, respectively, and secret weapon pianist Bill Evans (with Wynton Kelly on “Freddie Freeloader”), anchored by the rhythm section of bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb. The album marked a decided break from the cluttered, jittery be-bop beat to an atmospheric, blues-based cool, just as John Wesley Harding and The Basement Tapes marked Dylan’s post-motorcycle accident back-to-basics, communal improvisatory country phase after the apocalyptic speed blues-rock of Highway 61 Revisited. The legendary players form a virtual Jazz Hall of Fame, though this wasn’t about egos colliding, but individuals meshing their sometimes conflicting and disparate skills into a coherent album-length statement, a bridge between Sinatra’s ’50s Capitol albums and the flowering of Sergeant Pepper just eight years later. Kind of Blue was very much a sign that the album as an art form was about to enter its golden age. Even casual jazz fans will feel the familiar melodies of “So What,” the funky uptempo “Freddie Freeloader” or the wide-screen “Flamenco Sketches” under their skin as part of their musical/cultural DNA, its undulating waves at once comfortable and quietly urgent, the epitome of ‘50s cool giving way to ’60s upheaval, the calm before the storm. Hard as it is to believe, back then, jazz artists were in the pop mainstream, Miles one of the first true black superstars, in his way, the forerunner of cross-cultural role models like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan. Pictures of him crouching over the white Evans on the piano, insinuating that he was the teacher, guy in charge, caused a furor in what was then Eisenhower’s complacent, but racist  America . This wonderfully annotated double-CD set is filled with extras, including actual tape from the recording sessions, Evans’ original “Improvisations in Jazz” liner notes and several essays, including Francis Davis’ new liners. And its in-the-moment immediacy makes it seem like the lush sounds are being created spontaneously before our very ears right now. Miles Davis subtly ushers in the age of modernity with a work of timeless beauty.[ Back to Top ]

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Brian Wilson live at the Wiltern Theatre, That Lucky Old Sun DVD (Capitol): The resurrection of the eternal Beach Boy over the past half-dozen years has been nothing short of miraculous. Not only is his wife Melinda and three young kids getting him out of the house more, he now commands the best band he’s ever had over the course of his career, a remarkably sympathetic group—some young, some not-so—that are not only attuned to getting the music out that Brian hears in his head, but also truly worship him. You can see that in action on the hour-long Going Home, a documentary about the making of That Lucky Old Sun included on the just-issued DVD , in which the members express their admiration and awe. But it also shows Brian at work in the studio, directing his charges with a skill, awareness and instinct that are invariably belied by his distracted, if disarmingly direct, real-life manner. Ever since they helped him finish SMiLE in 2004, a mere 37 years after it was short-circuited the first time, Wilson has seemed a changed person, a load off his psyche, more comfortable in his skin, performing with self-confidence for perhaps the first time in his life. Led by vocalist/guitarist Jeff Foskett, Indonesia-born keyboardist Darian Sahanaja and multi-instrumentalist Scott Bennett, the 11-piece outfit is at once, the world’s greatest Beach Boys tribute band, and a remarkably adept unit in their own right, capable of recreating those famed four-and-five-part harmonies in the moment. Even since their concert last September at the Hollywood Bowl, the band has gotten even tighter, and the current live show is split between two sections, stunning recreations of the classics and a run-through of Brian’s newest opus, That Lucky Old Sun, a tribute to locating the heartbeat of his beloved L.A., co-written with Bennett and longtime collaborator Van Dyke Parks. The group is at their best on less obvious chestnuts like “Heroes and Villains,” “Sail On Sailor” and “Marcella,” while only Brian could follow the aching Big Love theme, “God Only Knows,” with the joyous mindlessness of “Do It Again.” That Lucky Old Sun seems to have suffered from the old critical sophomore jinx straw: “It took him four decades to finish SMiLE, and here’s a new song cycle just four years later,” but seeing is believing, both in the live performance at Capitol’s famed Studio A captured on the DVD , and at the Wiltern, accompanied by projections of vintage color post cards that reflect the SoCal lifestyle the Wilson brothers and their band helped popularize in the ’60s. Touching on his own roots in American popular music such as George Gershwin, Charles Ives and Cole Porter, Wilson’s That Lucky Old Sun finally revealed itself, a worthy successor to SMiLE and a touching, expansive work on its own. When Brian gets to the final, personal revelation in “Can’t Wait Too Long”—“Lost my way/The sun grew dim/Stepped over grace/And stood in sin”—it’s almost as if we’re living his catharsis through him, and the point is driven home with a collage of photos from his youth with Carl and Dennis, the last Beach Boy left standing. “At 25, I turned out the light,” he sings in “Going Home,” “Cause I couldn’t handle the glare in my tired eyes/But now I’m back/Drawing shades of kinder sky.” This time, it appears Brian’s back for good. Let’s just hope this national treasure is around long enough to continue to bask in the pure joy that spills out of his life’s work. He certainly deserves every accolade. [ Back to Top ]

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Antony and the Johnsons, The Crying Light(Secretly Canadian): English-Irish-born, San Jose, CA-raised and N.Y.-based singer-songwriter Antony Hegarty follows up his 2005 Mercury Prize-winning second effort, I am a Bird Now, with an album that firmly establishes him as one of pop music’s most singular talents. Probably best-known for singing “Candy Says” on tour with Lou Reed, captured on the live album Animal Serenade, and on the recent Julian Schnabel documentary of Berlin, Antony takes the gender-bending influence of the ex-Velvet leader, David Bowie, Boy George and Marc Almond one step further with a flamboyant personality and trans-sexual operatic castrati croon that is equal parts Roy Orbison, Klaus Nomi and Madame Butterfly,with the hesitant, breathy phrasing reminiscent of Johnny Mathis and Jimmy Scott. There is a mesmerizing, hypnotic quality to Antony’s mournful, keening whisper, which conjures up surrealistic visions that come out in the imagistic lyrics. “I cry ‘glitter is love,’” he sings in “Epilepsy is Dancing,” “My eyes pinned inside/With green jewels/Hanging like Christmas stars/From a golden vein.” The shimmering, pro-environment “Another World” imagines a place where someone like Antony is free to be himself after this one has been trashed, “I’m gonna miss the birds/Singing all their songs/I’m gonna miss the wind/Been kissing me so long.” The ethereal “Daylight and the Sun” has the surge of Orbison’s “In Dreams” in its depiction of a natural state, as he riffs Van Morrison-like on the phrase “Kissed by kindness” until “Your fire becomes a kiss.” On “Aeon,” Antony’s high-pitched quaver recalls the Stripes’ Jack White, a paean to a higher power that oozes the sensual as much as it does the spiritual: “Love my father/For my father is myself… Hold that man/In your tender clutch/Hold that man/I love so much.” By the time he hits “Everglade,” Antony is at one with the cosmos, “My body stops crying for home/My limbs stop weeping for home,” his yearning finally rewarded, his search for identity complete. Give The Crying Light a chance, and it will likewise creep under your skin, where it will insinuate itself into your being. Even with his musical antecedents, Antony is like nothing you’ve ever heard before.[ Back to Top ]

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Jamey Johnson, That Lonesome Song (Mercury Nashville): Another one of Universal Nashville boss Luke Lewis’ country-rock hybrids, Alabama-born Johnson makes his label debut with this sophomore album, which details the singer/songwriter’s hard-earned recovery from the drug and alcohol problems that had pretty much derailed a promising career since his 2006 bow, The Dollar. A tunesmith with an eye for narrative detail and an ability to describe his situation with clear-eyed honesty, he basically lays out his story in “High Cost of Living”: “My life is just an old routine/Everyday the same damn thing/Hell, I can’t even tell if I’m alive/I tell you the high cost of living/Ain’t nothing like the cost of living high.” The first single, “In Color,” is the kind of anthem that used to be standard in rock, a boy looking at old black-and-white photographs with his grandfather, learning about how he went through the Great Depression, World War II and the day he got married, evincing a matter-of-factness that captures the cadences of everyday conversation: “A picture’s worth a thousand words/But you can’t see what those shades of gray keep covered.” “The Last Cowboy” is a twangy Hank Williams-style lament that name-checks John Wayne, Gene [Autry] and Roy [Rogers], while “That Lonesome Song” perfectly captures the woozy day-over hangover from a bender. “What the hell did I do last night?/That’s the story of my life/Like trying to remember words to a song nobody wrote.” Yet another young Nashville acolyte with a reverence for classic country, the recently divorced Johnson is equally capable of crooning a love song like “Dreaming My Dreams” as he is the self-deprecating honky-tonk tribute to “Women”:
“I’ve made ‘em go insane and I’ve made ‘em go away/I just can’t ever seem to make one stay.” On the autobiographical “Between Jennings and Jones,” he describes his music business saga with a nod towards his own influences: “I left Montgomery on North 65/I was restless and ready to give Nashville a try/I rolled into town with a sound of my own/Somewhere between Jennings and Jones.” Which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad place to be at all.[ Back to Top ]

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Roy Trakin is Sr. Editor at HITS magazine
For more see www.hitsdailydouble.com or www.sonicboomers.com