Word: riffs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cool bass: "I got a pah" of $600 lizard shoes and I got silk shirts. I'm the Man, boy. I changes my clothes 15 times a day. Learn to hustle girls, and you can wear dark shades and sharkskin suits and ride a big white Caddy." Riff the horn player sniffs in disgust. "You've got to have dignity, boy, you be nothing without dignity. The only way to beat the Man is be going to school. Go back to school...
...albums worth of music, could have written in his sleep. "Getting Better," the tune Davies obviously wrote to spearhead record sales, is a pleasing little ditty that probably took two minutes to write and three to arrange. "Destroyer," the most hard-hitting song in the album, rips off the riff from one of Davies' earliest hits, "All Day and All of the Night." The rest of the songs, for the most part, are nice but unmemorable--safe territory...
Sometimes Jeffreys sings about these kids directly: the hard, hopeless downtown orphans whose hustle along the thin edge becomes a musical metaphor for political desperation and spiritual desolation. Often the kids lurk at the core of a lyric or, like phantoms, underneath a smart-stepping riff. Jeffreys does not always deal with them directly. His best tunes - many of them, like Mystery Kids, to be found on his newest album, Escape Artist -have the cool anger and the anxious tenderness of a street blood. A Jeffreys record is like a fast cruise across the radio band. Reggae, jazz and full...
...long work, it subsides into a reflective passage in which background vocalists solemnly intone 'DOOM DOOM DOOM' as the showers of a solo violin fall overhead. Then it culminates in an ending chant, with an Eastern/bagpipe-style guitar riff in the Tom Verlaine tradition. Who are the mystery kids? What makes them hopeless Jeffreys never pronounces. Perhaps there is no answer...
...disorderly, with "millions murdered for a kiss-me-quick." (Think of "The Human Touch," which at least assumed there was such a thing, or that it could heal, anyway.) "Strict Time," which follows, is the alternative--Shut Up and Dance, with the Attractions providing a relentless, broken-record riff that keeps Elvis on a treadmill. (Elvis is marvelous at trapping himself inside a melody, a regular rock and roll George Jetson.) There is better: "Watch Your Step," a melodic improvement on "Secondary Modern," about how any moment you could be thrown in jail, or worse, about the risk of taking...