 Concrete Blonde Like most everything the great, unheralded Concrete Blonde recorded, Free has some of the same nerdy LA "coolness" that you'll hear in countless nameless erotic thriller soundtracks – the type of approach you hear in the songs playing when the detectives walk into a strip club to question a suspect, the scene serving mainly to show some T&A, and the music as generically "ball-rockin'" as you can get. Concrete Blonde, though, were never generic, although they put out the same kind of adrenalized goth-rock with pseudo-social-commentary lyrics. "It's Only Money" attacks the pursuit of money. "God is a Bullet" attacks guns. Bands like this, I guess, just needed some issues to hang their attitudes on. What always separated Concrete Blonde from the rest of the pack was Johnette Napolitano's glorious voice (one of the very best rock voices of all) and the band's very tight way with a hook. Even when their songs were, in approach, not much different from the sort of thing you'd hear playing in a car chase scene on a straight-to-Showtime thriller, they always had great musical content. Free is kind of a car chase in and of itself: 33 minutes of ass-kickin' rock punctuated with some really emotional songs that take it to a different level. It's a CD that actually gets better as it goes along, since it starts out trying to rock your hairy ass, but around track 5 (the very pretty, very honest "Sun") the real Concrete Blonde starts to come out, sans attitude. The interplay between Johnette's voice and James Mankey's guitar work is really cool on "Sun." Sadly, the album lacks more of that stuff, and features too much of the kind of thing you find on "Roses Grow," which is more LA bluster and sheen. "Scene of a Perfect Crime" foreshadows the more well-defined Concrete Blonde style that would characterize the albums that followed. The best track on the disc, by far, is the most uncharacteristic: the hugely poppy, totally wonderful "Happy Birthday," easily the brightest thing the band ever recorded, featuring one of Johnette's best vocals ever, and some really great lyrics. I could, and sometimes do, listen to this one to excess. It's followed by the amazing "Little Conversations," a brilliant, enormously deep minor-key acoustic guitar ballad that, again, showcases Johnette in one of her best vocal performances. Everyone that loves PJ Harvey ought to listen to this one – PJ Harvey makes better records, in general, but she could never sing like Johnette at her best. The disc ends with "Carry Me Away" which is similarly somber and dark, exploding into rock but more genuinely than the songs on the first half of the album. Free, overall, is the sound of a band slowly ceasing to be generic. It's an album I wish I could say is much better than it is, but when you've only got 33 minutes of music and you could cut four songs to make it a better album, I guess you have to face facts. It's frustrating, though, that they never made a truly legendary album, because their flashes of brilliance leave you totally floored – and wondering why they didn't hit that all the time.
Review by Joe Panda |