Page 6
• DTH • Omnibus
Thursday • March 18, 1993
Monster riffs, intense grooves Colour funky release
Living Colour
Stain
Epic
••••
Q What’s black and white and
• red all over?
A: Living Colour’s new
• album, Stain.
Actually, it’s a black and
white album cover in a red plastic case.
Musically too, though, Stain rejects the
broad palette of styles that colored the
group’s earlier albums in favor of the
bold hues of intense hard rock.
Living Colour’s earlier albums drew
praise for their unique blend of guitar
rock, funk and soul with occasional jazz,
Latin and reggae influences. But on
Stain, Living Colour achieves a more
solid, consistent sound, sticking to the
metallic riff-rock of earlier hits like “Cult
of Personality,” from 1988’s Vivid and
"Type” from 1990’s Time’s Up.
There are few, if any, bands today
that can match Living Colour’s techni
cal command of their instruments with
out sounding overbearing or mechani
cal. Guitarist Vernon Reid and drum
mer William Calhoun are nothing short
of virtuosic.
Quick! Dodge this one
Quicksand
Slip
Polygram Records
Quicksand rather unfortu
nately proved to be the
generic grunge rock crap
that Arson Garden man
aged to escape. There’s not
much to say about Slip other than
don’t buy it.
The album gets a blob because 1
must admit I’m not an expert on
grunge, and some people out there
probably would like this album. But if
they do, they’re REALLY out there
and need to get their eardrums exam
ined maybe they’ve had one huge
slamdive too many.
If Quicksand aren’t from Seattle,
it’s pretty obvious they wish they
were. Their sound is not a million
miles away from better grunge bands
only about a thousand —but the
bad news for Quicksand is that no
matter where they’re from, they look
asp
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album
MIKE BRADLEY
Calhoun and the group’s new bass
ist, Doug Wimbish, create incredibly
tight, powerful grooves that propel the
album, even when Reid takes off on a
stratospheric solo.
Living Colour also knows how to
hold back and focus their talent into an
intense groove. “Never Satisfied" fea
tures a monster riff that sounds like
funky Led Zeppelin, and “Ignorance is
Bliss” employs a riff reminiscent of funk
rock masters Fishbone. “This Little Pig”
is the kind of speed metal that Ice-T
can only dream about.
Stain’s lyt ics complement the music’s
harder edge. The songs still feature Liv
ing Colour’s critical, sarcastic tone, but
this time around the lyrics are often
intensely personal rather than socially
focused. A quick glance at the song
titles (“Go Away," “Nothingness,”
“Wall") reveals the album's dominant
theme alienation.
The idea of alienation crops up
throughout the album. On “Nothing
ness,” vocalist Corey Glover sings, “All
that I can feel is my Icmeliness/Nothing in
the attic ’cept an empty chest." Many of
the songs are rife with cynicism: On the
album brief
alex McMillan
condemned to visit that hell for mu
sicians: obscurity.
The most puzzling thing about
how this album got produced is that
none of it makes any sense.
Here’s a sample lyric from “Lie
and Wait”: “Inequity solace m your
driven state seize your right to earn the
same she wants it.” I’m not making
this up. And I wish Quicksand hadn’t
either.
The sleeve is the best thing about
this album because it lists all the
profoundly deep lyrics and has great
grainy shots of people in ’6os bathing
suits diving around. There are also a
few photographs of the band “play
ing” their “instruments,” and some
what tellingly, you can’t see any of
their faces.
This is probably so that they don’t
get attacked by angry music review
ers who were forced to sit through
their whole album while their ears
ruptured.
album’s opening cut, “Go Away,”
Glover sings, “1 paid my 20 dollars to Live
Aidjl bade my guilty conscience to go
away.”
Not all of the songs on Stain are
directed inward. On “Aslander” (Ger
man for “outsider”), Glover sings, “Ev
erything that 1 want/isn’t everything that
you’ve got."
Filled with Reid’s dissonant guitar
wails, the song is a fiery expression of an
outsider’s rage and pain. On “Wall,” the
album’s bombastic closing track, Glover
sings, "We hate each other ’cause of race
and religion/We hate each other 'cause of
class and position." Only in the final
song’s chorus does Glover make a plea
for unity: “The wall between us all must
fad"
Despite most of the songs’ serious
themes, Living Colour’s sense of humor
still shows up on Stain. "Everybody loves
you when you’re bi," sings Glover on
“Bi,” a funky ode to bisexuality.
What separates Living Colour from
riff-rockers like Metallica and Helmet
is the group’s subtlety. Reid’s versatility
and the soulful passion of Glover’s voice
keep Stain from becoming bogged down
in metal boredom.
Reid’s use of guitar synthesizer on
“Nothingness” and “Hemp” is haunt
ing and beautiful, and Glover’s melo
dies show an expressiveness foreign to
most hard rock singers. And the funk
Garden grows an edge
Arson Garden
Drink a Drink of You
Vertebrae Records
Arson Garden’s limited edition
EP came as something of a
surprise. With a name like
theirs, I was expecting more
generic hard-rock/grunge sounding fod
der, but things turned out differently.
Arson Garden turned out to have a
sound somewhere between 10,000 Ma
niacs and The Cure, with Siouxsie from
the Banshees on vocals. The vocals are
the focal point of their music, as the
lyrics drift in and out, up and down and
leave you feeling happy. The vocalist
takes a lesson from Natalie Merchant’s
Drinking with Arson Garden
book, though, in that, although the
sound of the lyrics leaves you happy,
their content is not always quite so
upbeat. The words switch at times to
punning and biting humor, such as on
“She Reconsidered," where"tfie recon-
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They’re not just glamour boys anymore
grooves of “Bi” and “WTFF” give the
album another dimension without sac
rificing consistency.
Tight, powerful and moving, Stain is
Living Colour’s best album yet. The
album brief
alex McMillan
sidered she” wonders "who follows who,
swallows who, follows whol There's none
so lucky."
This EP has a harder edge than most
melodic college music. Their grinding
hint of anger belies otherwise pretty
tunes and adds a touch of ambiguity.
The feedback and grunge guitar mix
with cymbals, scales and lots of percus
sion to produce a fascinating form of
harmonious discord.
“Two Sisters,” one of two live tracks
on the 4-track EP, has a kind of Eastern
slant to it, leaving an impression that
you just invited a band of whirling der
vishes to come have a party in your
head. Perhaps some of you who had
particularly adventurous Spring Breaks
can relate.
The only downer about this EP is
the last song, a live version of “Trem
Two.” This is not an amazingly bad
track, but it could be a whole load
better, judging from the preceding
three. It seems a bit like Arson Garden
wanted a filler to round out an other
wise five-blob EP. Nevertheless, if
you’ve got enough left-over dough, go
out and give them a try.
\ratings
• forget It
•® wait for a bargain bis bay
••• tape It from a frieod
•••• boy it
••••• —buy two copies
MUSIC
group finally seems comfortable set
tling into a hard rock groove, refining
but not giving up the stylistic depth
that marked their earlier work.
Colour me impressed.
music charts
WXYC
1. Graeme Jefferies
Messages from the Cake
Kitchen
2. Superchunk
On the Mouth
3. Paris
Steeping With the Enemy
vDalltV aCfIUIBiS
Hardcore Devo M 2
5. Angels of Epistemology
Fruit
6. Tom Waits
The Early Years, V 01.2
7. BfttQNHHf
Messages and Portraits
8. Digable Planets
Reachin’
9. Various Artists
SoluableFish
10. Various Artists
Musk at Matt Motley's
Top 10
1. Snow
Informer
2. Peabo Bryson and Regina
A Whole New World
3. Dr. Die
Nuthin’ButA *6” Thang
4. Oman Oman
Ordinary World
5. Whitney Houston
I'm Every Woman
6. Sift
Freak Me
7. Whitney Houston
I Will Always Love You
8. Arrested Development
Mr. Wendal
9. Jade
Don’t Walk Away
10. Boa Jovi
Bed Of Roses
—Bfflßoari