The Test Tube and the Scale

This quietly sung Canadian idyll recalls Olympia Washington’s incomparable Fleetwoods, who lovingly finessed the nuances of romantic tenderness with such adroitness of songcraft that they easily transcended the genre-bound constraints of their early rock and roll musical peers. What Stars does convincingly well with The Aspidistra Files is to demonstrate with poetic accuracy love’s eye opening mechanics; how your senses, alive with the potency of emotion, go about alerting you to your place in nature, within its commensurate prospect. The Aspidistra Files is a remarkably sane performance, confident in its clarity and expression of shared emotion, from a band with an innate sense of romantic melancholy. “You whisper sweet lies to me, and one of them will be true,” Stars vocalist Torquil Campbell sings in a moment of disquieting lucidity, and the significance of the lyric reveals love’s core paradox:    that, in order to tend to its countlessly surprising demands, being in love means occ

  After re-recording the best songs from their debut record for re-release on the singles compilation Hatful of Hollow the Smiths went on to become an almost perfectly accomplished musical unit. By the time of 1985’s Meat Is Murder Morrissey’s struggle with giving shape to a satisfactory vocal style had been resolved, and, though technically it was no match for Johnny Marr’s guitar virtuosity, it was the voice of generational romanticized dissatisfaction his dedicated followers wanted to hear. What followed was a flawless string of releases that remained unbroken until the group’s dissolution in 1987. Released just months following the outrageous success of The Queen Is Dead, Ask is so exultant in mood that it makes its LP predecessor sound claustrophobic in contrast. Descended from their brilliant singles This Charming Man and William, It Was Really Nothing, Ask is “mature” by comparison, meaning its lyric is more concise, less detailed, and even contains a pair of couplets that rank

  On the late evening of November 22, 1980, I was occupying the place of my routine Saturday night roost, in front of the Curtis Mathes color console TV set in the den of my parents’ house. My favorite show, Saturday Night Live, was about to air and I was probably braced for disappointment because the show had a new cast, which had altered a very smart program that parodied American stupidity into a dumb, loud program. I kept watching, though, because the musical guests were, as is well known, consistently outstanding, especially for an American teenager learning that there was more to contemporary pop music than what was programmed on the Dallas-Fort Worth FM radio market I listened to. That night the host introduced Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. A four man group had taken the stage, and performed with a rhythmic intensity whose galvanizing effects still retain their power to directly challenge spoon fed concepts of American originality and homogeneity. Ashtray Heart, the seco

  A recurring figure in the history of rock and roll is an under sung character, almost always male, and often the object of sneering dismissal. He is talented, but his talent typically falls just short of whatever’s required to camouflage the other deficiencies of personality or image that’s said to mar his work as public performer. Known disparagingly as a poseur, the artist is considered so presumptuous a figure that his title is even denied the definite article. At the heart of the poseur discourse is an ongoing fixation with questions of artistic authenticity. When Elvis the cultural firebrand who helped revolutionize the way mass commercial audiences listened to pop music returned home from the Army to become the movie star of B-class Hollywood kitsch, his reputation met with what would eventually be seen as the first in an ongoing series of both professional and personal missteps. Despite the success of his famous 68 comeback, Elvis’ reputation was never the same again. After go