Yeah, how do I say this? Album, you're being demoted.
Rock Bottom, paradoxically, can count itself as one of the most flawed and one of the most perfect albums I've ever laid ears... laid in my... my ears got laid by (or with?) this album, is, I think, what I'm trying to say, because that's what people say. My ears lay with this album, in the Biblical sense, a bunch of times over the past just under fifteen or so years and it actually has a life even outside that, because I sing the opening, "Sea Song," a lot. In, honestly, a lot of situations that hearing me warble "partly fish, partly porpoise, partly baby sperm whale" (or anything involving that penultimate word there) or, for that matter, "when you're drunk, you're terrific," in a bad English old man baby accent, is disconcerting, as it would be, like, I've never been to a bar mitzvah or bar matzvah, but I'd imagine that that's exactly the sort of place I'd find ideal to just let my inner Bobby Wyatt out for everyone's enjoyment. Rant about Palestine, praise Stalin. This album honestly has like three of the greatest songs I've ever heard in my life, absolutely tip-top, top-notch, you'll need another notch in your belt to digest all the goodness in these songs, just good really fine quality choons even my mother loves. Except it's more like it's got one amazing song and then another amazing song twice, at different speeds, in different keys, and then a really short snippet of song followed by a spoken word bit by a man who if voices could be made into food, it's a good thing we can't make voices into food because there'd be none of this man's voice-food left because I would eat it all and die because it's very rich, probably. It is at least theoretically the most perfectly structured album, to boot. It's really very clever, the way the songs interact with and reference each other. "But then why isn't it five stars, woman, get to the point!?" I hear you exasperate. It's cuz the whole thing is flabby and noodly as fuck, that's why. There's just a lot of, well, vast areas in the songs where there's just a bass just flopping back and forth, or Commie Bob making whale noises or other such undesirable chaff that fattens up the perfect little nuggets of melody at their core til they've got foie gras for livers. "Alifie my larder?" Sounds like the sounds themselves indeed got larded up! It could've been the greatest EP ever with no effort but it had to be ruined by the keyboardist from Frink Ployd, who I will not honour enough to look up his name, I think it's Davey or something like that, farting about, because all that filler is not jazz by any stretch of the imagination. Ultimately, the thing that made me realize I didn't need this at 5 stars, or really, to ever listen to it beyond the final track, is because "Sea Song" and "Alifib" are honestly way more fun to perform myself than to listen to even one of my favorite vocalists perform them. I honestly can't think of another album that that has happened to. Transa? Nah. Casablanca Moon? Maybe. It's an anomaly: a nearly perfect, horribly flawed masterpiece.
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