Word: albums
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...album cover features a few of Rushen's instruments--an electric grand piano, microphone, and guitar. what it doesn't show is the clarinet, Rhodes piano, drums, bass synthesizer and tambourine. She's also got an orchestra behind her in every track. Rushen penned almost all the lyrics, arranged the music, conducted all but three of the selections and produced the album...
Patrice is not, however, flawless. The album's best lyrics are not written by Rushen alone, and for quite a few of the tracks, the list of musicians is even longer than the written lyrics. Hardly any of the songs venture into a new beat; Rushen therefore does not show much variety of style...
...public image" is the unifying concept for the album. Clearly uncomfortable with the sneering, puke-spitting persona created for him by Pistols manager Malcolm MacLaren (who gets singled out for abuse in "Lowlife"), Lydon wants to defy public expectations while still maintaining an audience, a limited public image. Unfortunately, it is Lydon's purposed demarche, his frankly experimental music, which fails most miserably...
...overlong but because they are, at base, ill-conceived; he is plainly playing with things he doesn't understand. haphazard electronic effects and innovation for innovation's sake do not succeed for experiment's sake; valid experimental music requires a knowledge and understanding, a directive genius, that this album simply lacks. However much he thinks producers are "rubbish" and superfluous, Lydon could only have been helped by the masterful touch of someone like Brian...
...rest of the album succeeds fairly well, just some pretty good rock and roll without attempts at transcendence. "Annalisa," about a girl in Germany whose parents starved her to death to exorcise the devil, moves as forcefully as some of the lesser Bollocks numbers. "Lowlife," a slam at former manager MacLaren, and "Attack," another standard rocker, are at least not bad. And "Public Image," which Simon Frith of Melody Maker called "the best non-disco 45 of the year," might be just that, although there's always the Stones' "Shattered...