I’ll say two things about NEEDTOBREATH, I keep forgetting they are born again Christians and I am still listening to their album with various degrees of pleasure. I’ll see this about Iggy -I underestimated the album earlier this week. I’ll say this about SZA, I overestimated the album when it was first released.
There are several good covers, a Yoko Ono here, a Bob Dylan there and a Lana Del Rey everywhere: they all work pretty well albeit not very well, his best solo album by a lot shot but it misses that one sure shot to get him back where he was
when I was young, I mean really young, maybe three years old, I dreamt I was an RAF pilot during the Second world war and shot down over the North Sea. I remember dreaming the plane was on fire and I was spiralling downwards. When I opened my eyes I was above my body looking down at me dead and then I was a child again safe in bed. I hadn’t even heard of WW2 at the time. Make of it what you will – A
But the truth is peppered in with same old same olds like Keith Urban we have a band that just a short while ago was playing a 200 person venue in Hartford Connecticut (psst we were there). Fabulous news and faith in humanity semi restored (not really). Happy new week!
The great WW2 English songwriters Art Noel and Don Pelos (they did “Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major”) find a way too make the conceit on this singalong stick in your throat along with the childlike rhymes because whenever you’re singing “nursie nursie imma getting worsie” maybe you’re not thinking high concept but you are thinking danger. Where there is a nursie there is an injury – A
Losing the vocal forces us to only endure the visual aspect of this collaboration from hell. The Black Lips are nothing more than a bar band. Non-descript , drum guitar bass for the bland set.
At 75 years of age, Peter Stampfel’s latest song, on cooler than we are Don Giovanni Records, “NSA Man” finds the former hippie violinist folkie as great as ever. The new album is gonna kill it, I promise and the opportunity to see him in the cramped Mercury Lounge on Thursday is a huge huge thrill.
