Buster Langs critic reviews American British Major Record Label

Your favorite critic is coming out of retirement to deliver his sermon on the state of music…

…

gravel dirt and clay
this old road
kris kristofferson
stone and glass paved masterpiece asphalt modern art lava and straw album
don was produced broken rocks
recorded mud and brick songs straight and narrow performances long and winding
listen
hard
to this old road kris kristofferson
ray davies neil young pete townsand paul mccartney bob dylan joni mitchell leonard cohen mick and keith
your old road is rapidly agin’
please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
furthur
on down this old road kris kristofferson

Kris Kristofferson This Old Road Released March 7, 2006
Available at your local record store. Support your local record store.

I’m back.

It’s obligatory. The trumpeting. The curtseying. The reverence. They drive their big motorcars up to the Harvest shrine and drop to their knees nodding to the noodling twiddle twaddle folksong bible babble. Hey old man you got your dignity. Your catalogue divinity. The sameness-i-tude squeakifying from out the vague child boy’s yearning yearling sheaves, leaves, a burning smoke screen, a pale hazy rock candy jellybean soda fountain fizz on the he-man watch fob scrabble weed chin as far as I can see. This old guitar is as dopey and dull as sad old King Elvis in Las Vegas. Through what foggy logic do a few sweet tears and four good songs make this thing anything near the hippest old guy on Earth’s best work ? This is just a little thing and that’s ok too.

Neil Young Prairie Wind released September 27, 2005
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Sulphur-belching electromagnetic distortion-nuked rock-blasting unit pauses to make acoustic masterwork and breaks down flat. This thing ain’t no American Beauty, no Rubber Soul no Sea Change no satori moment. It swerves dangerously towards a steel horse, and takes fourth place at an English folk revival meeting. Nothing like a howl. A drawn out low moan of a squeak. Beware of those hunger pangs while straining your ears, leaning out for love - you will lean that way forever. Looking into a black room, from which beautiful sounds escape, stripped of feeling. Stripped down, the naked pretender stands, just like a President, reeling out words that bump around the subject, never landing on the substance. A wolf on a leash. Ballad of a thin man, who, while dreaming his motorpsycho nightmare, wakes too soon. Unwilling or unable to reveal that sincere searing flash of flesh. One hundred artists channeled though the mixing board - references ricocheting in a hail of misfires. It’s at best, the least of
If I Could Only Remember My Name, or something cross-eyed stilted gnashed and Jungian. Earnestly inept. But then, the last three tracks - including the bonus track - sound like the sputtering start of something learning to growl.
So, the next album could be all that it’s cracked up to be. This thing crashes on takeoff.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Howl released August 23, 2005
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Transistors or tubes. Tight or raw. Pink or chocolate. Glazed or powdered.
The rock music buying public falls back on a vinyl daydream poly-fiber pillow.
Brevity masquerading as that something concise that saved pop n’ roll - a yawning jellyroll filled crispy cream scheme. Dumpsters, landfills, mines of recycled plastic remainders remnants of the wishing stars. The same sameness. Neo-boredom layered on nothing to say about ennui. Post modernism the primary excuse the flaccid justification for the re-hashed greasy diner fried frontier wasteland highway homage to a dusty harvest abundant with blanks. Fecund with barren promise. A revolver spins and cracks the night and that is the only dangerous music made around here. Take a walk on the quartz-flecked sidewalks glistening at seven am leaving the night smell of stale beer ringing in your ears. A reminder of what could have been and what was not. Another day on highway 61 revisited at the factory revisited on bowery near houston revisited in berlin. Electric risk muffled and piped down tin pan alleys. Mourning again for the morning when poetry was wiped on the shirt sleeve of pop music and the huddled masses - minds dilated - sighed cringed laughed and hung their heads in recognition. Slap back reverb echoes. Clanging guitars chugging like steamy creampuff puffs puffed from manholes clamoring for something more resonant.


The Strokes First Impressions of Earth released January 3, 2006
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That kind of production that hurts your ear. That kind of trash compactor drunken philosophy Phil Specter threw down on the Ramones in the last century. Where distortion is just another flavor and feedback is something like a sigh. That sound that somehow makes you actually feel a little nauseous. Rivers Cuomo’s lit major - The Waste Land/Ulysses/e.e. cummings - lyrics do not quell the waves of queasy cold sweats and the urge for flight. That big sound that pushes a band furthur. Furthur into that big spotlight where there is no turning back, no way back home. To the mansions on the hill and their sweet green vinyl siding melting down. That kind of production, the big meat hooks and solos, the big broadway metal choruses, big studio time, big money reality show public relations behind the music hype and rock history vomit re-gurge-a-nation sleepy tabloid fodder. That’s what Rick Rubin has come up with for this rudderless Weezer’s quest for bigger hits and more fame. They meditated upon a rock and out-tommied, Tommy, the Who’s worst, with hidden-in-plain-sight introspective power plop. Weezer fans may feel vindicated and sad to know that almost every third cousin out there has one Weezer song and has their band tucked in a little cubby in that big-popular uncaring way.
All the tired horses are asleep in their stalls. No mules kickin’. Good bye to Weezer that sucked it’s own way. Hello to Weezer that sucks like everything else high on the Billboard charts.
This one’s not a shining fish out of water platinum fluke-y first record.
Now that Rivers Cuomo has proclaimed his celibacy to the music press and the world wide web and the myspace-o-sphere, he just thinks about sucking.


Weezer Make Believe Released May 10, 2005
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Mush mouthed? Start a rock band. Headache? Live with some exploding mega-watt amplified screaming nuclear garage noise six to fourteen hours a night, night after night. Wonder why lyrics come out fully formed lumps of meaningless concrete plop? In the rock-noise-blinding-migraine-fire, the seventh ring of hell-on-fire furnace, the brain is reduced to a sauce of happy polyps. Crispy fried, neuronal mush in a skull shaped bowl. Rock star everyman playing chalk board whimper kennel cough solos that sound like the smell of three day old Alpo.


WILCO Kicking Television - Live in Chicago Released Nov 15
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Madonna Madonna Madonna. Madonna Madonna Madonna. Madonna Madonna Madonna. Madonna Madonna Madonna. Madonna Madonna Madonna.
Hype-machined pink bottomed glossy lipstuck lifestyled and half-baked pie-in-the-sky philosophical confections.
Detroit stamped your name, years ago, into the sheet metal scroll of popstars and punks. Your handsome young men, they’re driving Cadillacs now. And your mall girl fan, she’s a tough mama now. So, dance Madonna. Dance. Dance. Dance. Snore.
Must take nap.
Madonna Madonna Madonna. Madonna Madonna. Madonna.


Madonna Confessions on a Dance Floor Released Nov 11, 2005
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Lookout ! Grandpa is checking out your sister Mary. He’s writing songs for her in her Bratz notepad. He’s playing his expensive acoustic guitar outside her bedroom door, wearing an expensive black leather jacket, an expensive cigar clenched in his expensive teeth, a million dollar minstrel boy.
Oh Mary. Pop star gone poopy with a poppy headed producer smokes a weedy cloud of foggy notions into his croaky frog fuzz faced Las Vegas act. The two stare into each others’ eyes while Puff the Magic Dragon naps in the corner with your sweet Great Aunt Caroline. Caroline no, beach-whale Brian Wilson squeaks in to appear on this album to cough some phlegm and sand onto the studio floor. Hell yeah, Neil Diamond’s twelve fartsmelt tunes are sung here with prickly peppery pickled conviction and life affirming vinegar. Rick Rubin, was recently spotted in Palm Springs, and is rumored to be there courting Barry McGuire for his next project, tentatively titled
“Pot Belly Stove Pipe Organ Transplant”.


12 Songs Neil Diamond released Nov. 8th
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Caution! Paul McCartney bares his soul in his dopey mopey happy sappy silly frilly sad bad woogie boogie lyrics, displaying the precocious eighth grader hidden in the sixty-something superstar. The brilliant musician is dulled down again to a mr. mustard dead dog’s eye custard luster due to bluster. Shame Paul didn’t bring Yoko’s jangling bag of John Lennon bones to the studio so they could flick lit cigarettes at Paul’s face whenever he drifted into his standard corn syrup soliloquies. Nigel Godrich is too in awe of the aw-shucks huckster to add anything more than the same old blipblap claptrap from Radio-head’s ragged bag of two bit over-sampled over-baked over-hyped post modern minimalist bombast. Brilliant shimmers of harmonic aplomb from the multi gifted grandpop with lyric sophistication on vacation.
Pathos bathos eros and schmaltz.

Chaos and Creation in the Backyard Paul McCartney Released September 13
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A man. A man who knows. Knows music. Knows style. Knows what is new. Knows classic. Knows what rocks? No, he can not rock. This is a smooth, studied practitioner of predictably reliable results. Smoothie Bobby Darin daddy-o man could actually sweat and make something noisy and sincere, something almost like rock. Billy Joel ends up on Broadway. Not with Sondheim, not with Kurt Weill, up there with the webbed Lord Andrew of Bombastica, that creepy crawdaddy of the crawling crescendo.
A confidence man the consummate fashion plate of consomme with a double helping of cheese whiz couture. A parrot, a pauper, a pop and a clang, a bing crooney crony in a diet cherry cloak. Suffering from the disease of conceit. Captain Jackass on the yellow brick-a-brack, everyone’s cousin thirteen times removed. A sweet sticky prickly corn-dog doo-wop jukebox historian in a custom tailored tuxedo. Scholar. Hits-macher. No rock found here.

Billy Joel My Lives Released Nov 22, 2005
Available at your local record store. Support your local record store.

Thank you,
Buster Langs

buster AT busterlangs DOT com