Them Apples

originally published October 17, 2001

MERCURY REV
All Is Dream
V2

Ye gods, what a wretchedly, nightmarishly wrong record the new Mercury Rev is. Everything about it is thoughtless, overcooked, sludge-thick posey. The songs obscure their complete lack of melody and conceptual daring behind dry-ice orchestration, gut-sacking big fat fucking drums and hazy, melted-circus-peanut production. The lyrics are can't-be-serious masturbatory word salad as pseudo-absurdism. (See "The Dark Is Rising," the album's pathetic wowser of a leadoff cut: "I have my suspicions/ When the stars are in position/ All will be revealed/ But I know until then/ Unless the stars surrender/ All will be concealed.") The melancholy that rose from the band's 1998 classic Deserters' Songs like dust from a box of your grandparents' love letters is now Swiffered away, replaced by a unpleasantly sticky lite-psych glaze. At least "Tides Of The Moon," "Chains" and "Lincoln's Eyes" are honest, glorious failures; the record's second half can't seem to decide whether it wants to parody Deserters' Songs or Leonard Cohen's New Skin For The Old Ceremony. All Is Dream resurrects and then soaks to death everything that suck-suck-sucked about 70's art rock. Yes, the next Flaming Lips record will no doubt disappoint everyone as well, but I can't imagine it touching this travesty. All Is Dream stands alone. It makes me wish I could wake up again at the beginning of the day I first heard it with the ontological chalkboard wiped clean. It's a sickening, overwhelming, fascinating disaster of an album. I can't stop listening to it. Because I've got this thing for glorious failures. (14 E. 4th St., NY, NY 10012)
VARIOUS ARTISTS

The Funky Precedent, Vol. 2
Matador

This comp submits the San Fran Bay Area as a new Mecca for fundamentalist hip hop. It boasts none of the red-eyed loopiness of Outkast, the sauced surrealism of Ol' Dirty Bastard, the snarky self-deprecation of Prince Paul, the thrillingly obnoxious whimsy of Kool Keith, or anything else that, in the last few years, has made mainstream hip hop the music of choice for intelligent, self-respecting white party girls. It's loaded with superserious tongue twisters, jaw-dropping vernacular vocab, chessmaster flow and no-nonsense, no-effects beat science, and it takes itself as seriously as you care to imagine. This is humorless shit, dad. It rants and lectures and intimidates everyone in the place like the persnickety Muslim parked by the keg in Menace II Society. It's as if the genre's post-Chronic fallout had never happened; the low-riding, nebulously hostile numbskulls that album exploited had never appeared (and thus never demanded any condescendingly righteous reactions or forced light-heartedness from the right coast); and everyone was still, as they used to say, conscious.

Rasco, Eye Cue, Rashinel and Khaos Unique defend their formidable rhyming skills against a perceived army of infidels. Azeem sermonizes like he's awaiting the apocalypse; Anticon sermonizes as if 11 minutes into a crystal binge. Foreign Legion's unrepentant tale of bike thievery wraps up daring the consumer to shoplift the record. Short story: These tracks are finally updating the BDP formula. Whether or not they gain any attention from a national mainstream that, for as long as anyone can vividly remember, has finessed the senses on the intellect's tab (and probably thinks of DJ Quik when you say "West Coast"), they've got the tightness and conviction a hip hop fundie craves.

With one inexplicable exception: Stymie And The Pimp Jones Love Orchestra's fun-kay, horn-laden "Fan Club," which stands out like a drunken cheerleader at a debate tournament. I'll wager this one'll be everyone's favorite or least favorite number on the disc. Either way, that's why the program setting is there. (625 Broadway, NY, NY 10012)
TORI AMOS

Strange Little Girls
Atlantic

The armchair psychoanalysts are already wrapping themselves in red flags of all shapes and sizes over this li'l platter. So I'm not going to ante up with another explanation of why the fuck chamber pop's most solipsistic enigma decided to give Eminem's honey-slayin' "'97 Bonnie And Clyde" her own nightmarishly coy Fairie Tale Theatre reading. Draw your own conclusions. And I'm not going to suggest that she's resubmitting The Boomtown Rats' "I Don't Like Mondays" at a pro-female angle, at an anti-buckshot angle or at any other angle. Without consulting Amos, I couldn't say for sure. And you certainly won't hear me comment on the possible (and, if it's there, extremely heavy-handed) social commentary she might be lacing into John Lennon's "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" (which already feels overcovered, although I can only think of one other version). It's really none of my business.

I will say that, have you any patience for Amos at all, you can't miss her bracingly overwrought, barely recognizable stand on Neil Young's "Heart Of Gold." And that "I Don't Like Mondays" is a much better tune than I remembered. And that her barely-there recitalisms reveal the compositional flaccidity of "Enjoy The Silence" that Depeche Mode's swinging zeroes and ones obscured. So give this a spin, if you think it might be your thing. And, although I've never met Tori Amos personally, I'm pretty sure she lines her kittyboxes with your fanmail. (1290 Avenue Of The Americas, NY, NY 10104)