Word: baerwald
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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MUSIC David Baerwald's tough new album is rock noir...
...Baerwald's cast of misfits, misbegottens and woebegones are not merely marginal types. They live on both sides of the margin: under it, like bats clinging to the top of a cave, and above it, delineating it, marking off new limits for themselves to cross. Triage is inhabited by both the victims and the perpetrators of power -- those whom it intoxicates, others whom it trashes. In order to remove any doubt about this, the record is dedicated to members of the diplomatic and espionage elite -- Henry Kissinger, the Dulles brothers and James Baker, among others -- "in the sincere hope that...
...album kicks off with a track that never made it to Bedtime Stories, Baerwald's fine solo debut: A Secret Silken World, a chronicle of a Saturday- night pickup. Then it ricochets into The Got No Shotgun HydraHead Octopus Blues, which takes up -- with pulsing drums and crunching guitar -- the matter of reciprocal footsie between government and drug dealers. The record is not an editorial, however. Baerwald is not interested in pointing fingers; he wants to nail a mood of corruptive malaise and the autoeroticism of power. One of the record's spookiest and loveliest songs, The Postman, takes...
...Baerwald is assured and savvy enough to mock his own obsessions (notably in AIDS & Armageddon: "I dream assassination/ I hallucinate cash") and to give even his most dour lyric excursions a solid foundation of rhythm throughout. You might not be able to party down to Triage, but you sure can dance to it -- right over the edge...
...Baerwald making a short film based on the Triage album