Word: lyric
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most of the songs, however, are good enough to compensate for the group's lyric impotence, and the Beach Boys are at their best when performing the rhythm and blues songs of Dennis Wilson or Brian Wilson's cuts...
...version that eventually became a hit, the lyric (rendered by an entirely different vocalist) was diffused into "Dance with me, Henry,/Let's dance while the music rolls...
...Introduction" fades into "The Shepherd," a devastatingly simple lyric poem, that like all of Blake's songs, is nevertheless rich in its suggestive power. Ginsberg's music is sweet and flowing but the song is almost spoiled by Peter Orlovsky's bleating voice. Ginsberg solos on "The Echoing Green" and the results here are much better. On the next cut, "The Lamb," Ginsberg and Orlovsky join voices again, and turn what is probably Blake's most popular poem into a tripped-out nursery song. This song expresses the essence of Blake's vision of innocence. Man is Child gently watched...
...strain has entered into the Russian ballad. Some recent songs describe the insane asylums where more and more dissenters, whose "crimes" do not qualify for prosecution under Soviet law, are imprisoned with genuinely sick people. For example, Vladimir Vysotsky, a popular balladeer, has composed a song called The Psychiatric Lyric. He sings of the silent, incurable lunatics who stare at the terrified political prisoner as he lies in the ward. "They are madmen of all kinds, quiet ones, dirty ones-starved and beaten as part of their cure. If only Dostoevsky, in his House of the Dead, could describe them...
...Stage Fright, the group's best record yet, their sound remains an intricate and often complex assimilation of styles, with heavy emphasis on country and good old rock and roll. If anything, the sound is now simpler, more accessible. But deceptively so. It complements a lyric complexity that only emphasizes that The Band gets into territory few popular musicians have ever traveled. Among many other things, the album talks about the terrors of performing and violence on the streets, but does it all with such infectious and graceful simplicity that you'll really have to listen, and then...