Word: albums
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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R.E.M. is a Georgia band playing its way past cult status, and its new album, Document (I.R.S. Records), will serve as a tidy introduction to its flights of hard whimsy. Particular attention should be paid to a little ditty titled Its the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine). But these guys are not just wise-offs. Their King of Birds, with its overlapping rhythms and wisps of Indian instrumentation, is a distinctive anthem of musical independence...
...BoDeans should know. Their second album, Outside Looking In (Reprise/ Slash), produced by Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads, is a tuneful advance over their exceptional debut last year, Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams. They give those roots a few strong twists, then tie them in tight rhythmic knots. Say About Love could almost come from some rediscovered master of a Buddy Holly session in Clovis, N. Mex. What It Feels Like moves like a cat burglar, sounds fresh as tomorrow and -- well, feels like the future...
...Tunnel of Love appears in stores this week, but anyone with a radio has already heard Bruce Springsteen telling what it is about. The first single from the album, Brilliant Disguise, floats easily in the air to a snapback, mid-tempo rhythm. It is like a silk scarf shading a lamp: the song throws off odd refractions of color and veils a 100-watt glow. The melody is sinuous, but the lyrics say something scary just at the end: "God have mercy on the man/ Who doubts what he's sure of." That is Tunnel of Love in two deft...
...title track of Springsteen's 1984 album, Born in the U.S.A., sounded like a marching song, but the rhythm thrust home a sawtooth short story filled with despair and defiance. The new LP is a little more straightforward and a lot more spare. Springsteen's E Street Band reveled on Born in the U.S.A. Here they hang back; indeed, on four songs the Boss handles the instrumentation by himself. Born in the U.S.A. was an album full of bright light and bold colors and deliberate, surreptitious contradictions. Tunnel of Love, by contrast, seems washed in autumn moonlight, pale and chill...
...album has a solid contemporary sheen, but it is never polished. It is as if Springsteen had buffed up a brand-new car with a sandpaper chamois. Using only simple instrumentation, with an occasional synthesizer riff or guitar blitz, Springsteen has created a modern surrogate for the resonant mystery on old blues and early rock records. This makes Tunnel of Love close kin to his 1982 solo effort, Nebraska, which was meant to sound homemade. Tunnel of Love takes that approach even further, into the mythic heart of American music and some slat-roof recording studio -- maybe on a prairie...