Music Review - All The Albums
Willie's comments: Before I begin phase
two of these Jazz Butcher reviews (i.e., filling in all the gaps in his
discography), I need to point out two things. One is that a lot of these
albums are recorded under the name the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy, but I'm not
going to make the distinction between JBC and JB here, because there really
is no measurable difference. Secondly, all of the missing fragments in my
collection were provided to me by an insanely kind individual who goes by
the name NameDotCom. One day, he e-mailed me out of the blue and asked if
I'd like for him to make me copies of a lot of Butch's out-of-print material
so that I could review it, and what should arrive in my mailbox this week
but nearly the entire Jazz Butcher discography? I've been tirelessly
searching for these albums for like five years, so imagine my euphoric delight
at finding them all wrapped up in a nice little package, with colorful slim
jewel cases. My gratitude toward NameDotCom is boundless, and all he asked
in return for fulfilling my lifelong dreamis that I ask all of you
JBC fans out there to please purchase these albums in a manner that will
result in money actually getting into Butch's pockets, if possible. The label
Vinyl Japan has recently started re-releasing some of the old stuff (A
Scandal in Bohemia and Distressed Gentlefolk, as of this writing),
and it's not only cheaper to buy the records directly from them as opposed
to on eBay, but you'll be supporting one of the most talented British songwriters
of the past twenty years.
Bath Of Bacon
Why didn't Vinyl Japan start their re-release campaign with the Butcher's
first album,
In Bath of Bacon, you ask? Well, presumably this is because
they wanted to earn a little money from the first batch of re-releases in
order to fund the next batch, and frankly, they probably wouldn't make a
dime off this one. It's a magnificently stupid album. It opens with the cheesiest
lounge-funk song you can imagine, with the Butcher (AKA Pat Fish, though
that isn't his real name either) introducing each band member in the most
obsequious manner possible: "Martin K. Daly, the Prime Minister of Funk."
From there, things desend (or ascend, depending on your point of view) into
smart-alecky songs about Bigfoot, food poisoning, zombies, how wonderful
kittens are, and parties ("This is partytime, and it's better than a cold
bath with someone you dislike").This jovial idiocy is all a put-on,
though; it's belied by the thoughtful, subtle "Chinatown," a beautiful song
that is carried by Fish's minimalistic flute playing and lyrics that evoke
Cold War paranoia. Even if most of the other songs sound as though the lyrics
were made up on the spot (the sexy "La Mer" is a song sung entirely in French
that purports to be about the sea, but suddenly veers off onto the topic
of elephants), there's a hilarious twinkle of intelligence behind it all,
and the music is a lo-fi treat that melds Frank Zappa's more accessible
indulgences with the twee carnival folk of Split Enz's early work. If you
can find it,
In Bath of Bacon is slight, immature, and just this side
of brilliant.
Grade: B+
A Scandal In Bohemia
It should be noted
at this point that the Jazz Butcher's music has nothing whatsoever to do
with jazz. (To some, this will be a major selling point.)The "butcher"
aspect is appropriate, however, since
A Scandal in Bohemia finds the
band chopping up various elements from rock history, walloping them with
a surgical two-by-four, and stitching them back together in mutations that
resemble some of the more whimsical creatures from the bad kid's bedroom
in
Toy Story."Soul Happy Hour," for example, borrows a few lines
from "Money (That's What I Want)" and inserts them into an ingratiating doo-wop
arrangement, all in the service of a drinking song. "My Desert" is a stirring,
anthemic waltz that skewers the pomposity of stirring anthems (think the
theme to John Wayne's
The Green Berets), while "Caroline Wheeler's
Birthday Present" is a drunken, stomping sort of proto-punk mess that
inexplicably juxtaposes Alice Cooper and Jim Morrison with rotting fish and
sausages. Even if I don't care for "I Need Meat" (which isn't due to the
fact that I'm a vegetarian so much as the fact that I don't like rockabilly
to begin with, and less so when the song's riff is constructed from the
off-kilter opening to "These Boots are Made for Walking"), that's made up
for by two of the great lost singles of the eighties: "Southern Mark Smith
(Big Return)" and "Real Men." The former is an airy, straightforward pop
song that has one of the best keyboard lines you'll ever hear, and the latter
is a hilarious rant against bullying, beer commercial machismo ("They're
stronger than a sheet of metal and they're in the rugby club reserves/Buy
the wife a birthday kettle/These are real men getting on my nerves"). This
would not have been possible on their previous album, but Fish, guitarist
Max Eider, and the new, taut rhythm section of bassist David J. and drummer
Owen Jones have miraculously evolved into a polished satirical unit. It's
never as off-the-hook silly as Ween or anything, but the Jazz Butcher's droll
brand of genre-splicing is every bit as accessibly clever. Check it out.
Grade: A
The Gift of Music
This is a slapdash
collection of singles and B-sides from the Butcher's first two albums. In
anyone else's hands, such a bizarre collection of songs ("Water" is a cousin
to Syd Barrett's "Effervescing Elephant," "Drink" is the precocious nephew
of the Rat Pack's lounge-swing fetishes,"Jazz Butcher Meets Count Dracula"
is the retarded half-brother of "Monster Mash") would give you a headache,
but since
In Bath of Bacon and
A Scandal in Bohemia were cohesive
albums only in their bratty
lack of a linear style,
The Gift of
Music fits as perfectly into the Butcher's oeuvre as Tetris blocks. "Southern
Mark Smith" has stupidly been reinvented as an annoying, bouncy popster,
and the alternate version of "Marnie" withers in comparison to
Scandal's rendition, but they're mitigated by the new-and-improved
"Zombie Love" and a killer cover of Johnathan Richman's "Roadrunner." Plus,
"Jazz Butcher vs. the Prime Minister" has to be the most loony-yet-informed
political rock song ever written (Fish threatens to literally consume good
ol' Maggie Thatcher). There has never, to my knowledge, been a B-sides collection
that didn't suffer a bit in the "substance" department, even if the songwriting
was there. Never before, though, has this been turned into a bona fide
asset.
Grade: B+
Sex And Travel
Two months after the
release of
The Gift of Music, the Butcher's third proper LP revealed
a newly mature band- one who had learned how to temper their goofiness with
a regretful sincerity (and who was still savvy enough to dilute the sincerity
with goofiness), while still keeping the tunes front and center."Only
a Rumour" is a terrific, introspective ballad about a nadir in a romantic
relationship, and the mind-blowing Spaghetti Western epic "Walk with the
Devil" expertly chronicles its bitter end. Less heavy but still just as subtle
are "Down the Drain" (a cute Max Eider nursery rhyme) and "Holiday" (a parody
of an uptight, "regular English-speaking gentleman on holiday" which lists
his daily itinerary to a breathless, inflexible rhythm). In fact, only the
jankly rave-up "Red Pets" is too knowing for its own good. Too short at only
eight songs (I listened to the whole thing on the way to the video store
and back),
Sex and Travel nevertheless documents an important step
in the Jazz Butcher's career: the one that lifted him above mere "novelty
act" status and marked him as one of the great British zeitgeist photographers
of the 1980s.
Grade: A-
Bloody Nonsense
You know, the Jazz
Butcher might be pushing things a bit by this point. Just 13 months after
The Gift of Music (and one month before the release of
Distressed
Gentlefolk) comes... another compilation! Six of these 14 songs were
actually
on The Gift of Music! So why bother with this one?
Well, if you can't find any of the previous albums (and somehow magically
come across this one), all of these songs
are terrific, from the
infectious "President Reagan's Birthday Present" to the invigoratingly sloppy
"Caroline Wheeler's Birthday Present." Also, if you're a Butcher completist,
five of these songs hadn't yet seen proper release on an LP, and confound
it, they're essential: "Death Dentist" is a nifty ripoff of the
Peter
Gunn theme, "The Devil is My Friend" is a fun stab at Hank Williams,
etc. If neither of those two
ifs above apply to you, though, leave
this one be, because it's just mind-bogglingly
redundant! Resist the
urge to pick up everything that has the words "Jazz Butcher" on it just because
you were unlucky enough
not to have been buying records in an age
where there was a glut of wonderful Jazz Butcher product. It's a
trick.
Grade: C+
Distressed Gentlefolk
While this album is
not as consistently enjoyable as
Fishcotheque or
A Scandal in
Bohemia, it's still a lot of fun. Many of the songs are written
in a hotel-lounge-bar-blues fashion, which effectively plays against the
cynicism of songs like “Domestic Animal” and “Who Loves You
Now?” And the songs that rock do so with a very particular, British
wit: “Big Bad Thing” is rendered hilarious by its “Vut you
vant?” shouts, while “Hungarian Love Song” is an amusing
cannibalism number in the same vein as that Monty Python sketch where the
sailors all insist that they be the ones eaten in case of trouble. Ballads
“The New World” and “Angels” really go nowhere, however,
and bland sideman Eider shouldn't be allowed to sing, but the winners
still outnumber the losers.
Grade: B
Big Questions
Also known as
The
Gift of Music volume 2,
Big Questions marks the Butcher's return
to compilations that are actually worth picking up, instead of redundant
cash-ins. With the exceptions of "Death Dentist" (which appeared on
Bloody
Nonsense) and an interminable, seven-minute version of "The Human Jungle"
(from some versions of
Sex and Travel), all of these songs were recorded
and released in the year following
Distressed Gentlefolk on various
EPs. With snarky lyrical references to Brian Eno, the Soft Boys, and Peter
Lorre (who gets his own infectiously stupid theme song), the better part
of the album consists of intimate acoustic/synth songs performed solely by
Fish and Eider. "Mersey," for example, is so despairing that it hardly matters
that Fish is backed by a chintzy keyboard straight out of the song from
An
American Tail. From there, "Thing" is a brief snippet of heavily reverbed
blues, "Rebecca Wants Her Bike Back" is another great buzzsaw rocker, "City
of Night" is one of those perfect, ominous accordion numbers whose ethnic
influences I can never put my finger on (these things always sound
French-Italian-Greek to my ear), and the list goes on and on. These simple
little songs prove that even a record full of what sound like the products
of a one-night jam session can be emotional, funny, catchy, and all-around
wonderful in the hands of the Jazz Butcher.
Grade: B+
Fishcotheque
After
Gentlefolk, the Butcher's band parted ways with him, and he hooked
up with a bunch of new musicians, who took the band in a more rocking, less
divergent direction.With shimmering guitars reminiscent of the Cocteau
Twins (in tone only), a plain British singing voice reminiscent of Robyn
Hitchcock, and hilariously smart/smarmy lyrics reminiscent of everyone from
Kurt Vonnegut to Neil Finn, The Jazz Butcher, on this album, crafts some
of the best dang rock songs I've ever heard. On
Fishcotheque, there's
a brilliant nonsense rap about chickens (sample lyric: "Chicken on holiday/
Chicken in jail/ You wake up in the morning, there's chicken in the mail"),
a seductive pop song about divorce ("Get It Wrong"), and nine other slices
of genius. This is actually a good place to start, if you can find it.
Grade: A+
Big Planet\, Scarey Planet
This album leans more
toward noisy rock than the good-natured pop of
Fishcotheque, but that's
not a bad thing. Also spicing things up are odd samples from old films and
some of the Butcher's most pointed non-sequitur lyrics (most evident on
"Nightmare Being": "I'm invisible, like salmonella"). "Line of Death" is
a Middle Eastern rave-up that incorporates elements from
Deliverance
and
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, while "Do the Bubonic Plague"
is a funky ode to the titular disease. Catchiness a'plenty!
Grade: A+
Cult Of The Basement
Cult of the Basement
isn't quite as consistent as the previous two offerings. I say that only
because of the interminable "Turtle Bait," which the Butcher himself admitted
that everyone hates. Apart from that, though, this album is a bit more
ballad-centric than, say,
Big Planet Scarey Planet, but "Sister Death"
and "Pineapple Tuesday" are two of the best ballads in musical history. "The
Basement" is a wonderful surf-rock instrumental, and "Mr. Odd" is pure pop
ecstasy (and there's a "Space Oddity" reference, too!). And "My Zeppelin"
is just weirdness that involves Steffi Graf for no particular reason.
Cult
of the Basement is a strange little cruller, but a rewarding one.
Grade:
A-
Condition Blue
Apparently, this is
an album that was made after a lot of personal pain and anguish for Butch.
That might explain the lack of effort that was apparently put into the album-
there are only nine songs, and one of them ("Monkeyface") is practically
the exact same song as "The Basement" from the previous album, only with
different samples layered overtop of it. However, the eight new songs are
mostly pretty good (if overlong). They're mostly poppy tunes of the sort
found on
Fishcotheque, only with a slightly darker edge to songs like
"Honey" and "Racheland." It's not my favorite album, but as the
Trouser
Press Guide to 90s Rock pointed out, "Mediocre Butcher beats the prime
cuts of mere mortals anyday."
Grade: B+
Waiting For The Love Bus
All you need to know
about this album is that it has a song about penguins on it. Sure, there's
all sorts of tunefulness and melodicism and hookery and those good things,
but the most important thing about
Love Bus is that it has Butch chanting
dolefully, "We are penguins/ We are penguins/ We are flightless/ We are standing/
On our eggs." It makes me smile.
Grade: A
Rotten Soul
After a lengthy
hiatus, Butch reunited with estranged sideman Max Eider and put out this
album on the Vinyl Japan label. As Eider writes in his witty liner notes,
"We have nothing but good to say of Vinyl Japan, but I'm sure they won't
mind my pointing out that [this album has] been made on the cheap." This
is a bit of an understatement.
Rotten Soul features the cheapest drum
machine this side of Trio and a total lack of production (one example: the
opening verse of Eider's "The One You Adore" is marred by the piercing line
noise from a guitar whose part hasn't started yet). This has the unfortunate
effect of making the subdued songs which make up a large portion of
Rotten
Soul sound as though they were performed by an above-average karaoke
band. Sometimes Butch manages to transcend his budgetary limitations: the
buff "Tough Priest" transcends the lo-fi nature of the proceedings by means
of a killer hook and the Butcher's use of an ominous Irish accent. "Mr. Siberia"
works with the cheapness of the sounds to produce a terrific slice of slow
funk, but those are the only two songs that measure up to the standard set
by
Fishcotheque and
Big Planet Scarey Planet. Some songs sound
like mere demos ("Big Cats"), and some just sound
sad (the ill-advised
country ballad "Sleepwalking"). Mr. Eider himself is another problem. His
leisurely songwriting style has never really meshed with the Butcher's
aggressiveness, and while his tunes are a vast improvement on the Jimmy Buffett
margarita-rock formula, they pale in comparison to Butch's. (Parrotheads
would do well to seek out Eider's well-meaning solo album
The Best Kisser
in the World, however.) There's simply not enough joy to be had here,
I'm afraid. It's a disappointing comeback.
Grade: C
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