An informal consumer guide to current rock and pop
Check them out, tune them in, slip them on, let them spin. Herewith, a spring garland of rock and pop, with a few sprigs of hemlock for good measure.
Public Image Ltd.: Second Edition (Island/Warner Bros.). The weather forecast on the far frontiers of rock is a little cold and spooky, if this record is any indication. Alternately rigorous and unhinged, steam-heated and strangulated, Second Edition is the collective work of the band John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) formed when he broke with the Sex Pistols. The Pistols' music was like a mugging; Public Image's is like a football match in purgatory. Using repeated chords, shattered rhythms and lyrics that sound like electrocuted William Burroughs ("Spreading tales/ Like coffin nails/ Is this living"), Public Image puts on a kind of psychic garage sale whose object is to bankrupt conventional rock. "Wouldn't waste the effort on entertainment," Lydon sings in Chant, and the band plays by that rule for four adventurous sides.
Lou Reed: Growing Up in Public (Arista). Wherever Lydon and all other assorted punks, new wavers and no wavers may have come from, no matter where they are all headed, Lou Reed has already been there. Public Image owes a debt to the saber-toothed experiments of Reed's late '60s band, the Velvet Underground, and Reed still remains several furlongs ahead of anyone in laying down jagged fragments of autobiography that cut like pieces of a shattered mirror. Growing Up in Public is a collection of primal assaults and tentative love songs that all together are like a return ticket from a voyage to the end of the night.
Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band:
Against the Wind (Capitol). Out a few weeks, and a thorough smash, this album is a collection of loose-limbed rockers and high-reaching ballads. Every cut has its eye fixed on the top of the charts with such calculation and skill that listening to the whole record straight through is like being held for ransom at WKRP. Seger is a topflight regional rocker out of Detroit, but this time around he is sticking to formula so rigidly that he has started to rewrite himself.
The J. Geils Band: Love Stinks (EMI-America). Best title of the year. "I been through diamonds/ I been through minks/I been through it all/ Love stinks" is good cautionary advice for a heady season. It's not Sir John Suckling, but it sure beats Seger's pastilles about star-crossed lovers and drip-dry romances. The J. Geils Band, like Seger, has a hard r & b foundation, but, unlike Seger, they are not going overripe. This is a good-times record that makes no apologies for its frivolity, comes off fresh, wild and goofy —like a recital by a bunch of hubcap thieves who just graduated from the Famous Comedians School.
Billy Joel: Glass Houses (Columbia).