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T O P I C R E V I E W
Joe Morris
Posted - 08/12/2009 : 06:02:45 Don't know about this one
Forever Changes [Columbia, 1967]
"Art-rock," sneers my wife, who's never heard it before. "Movie music," Greil Marcus recalls fondly. "I just played it this week," R. Meltzer tells me--and then places its release in early 1968 because it came out the day before a well-remembered abortion. All wrong. It came out November 1967, and neither art-rock nor movie music, no matter how fondly recalled, will permit a song that begins with an elegantly enunciated "Oh, the snot has caked against my pants/It has turned into crystal." Arthur Lee was always too oblique for his own good. Here he counterposes a background-music feel and a delightful panoply of studio effects against his own winning skepticism and the incipient Jaggerishness of his pseudo-Johnny Mathis vocals. Perhaps because it retains so much humor, his battle cry--"We're all normal and we want our freedom"--hasn't dated, the melodies really hang in there, and only Steely Dan has ever attempted a record so simultaneously MOR and anti-MOR. A-
2 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First)
Joe Morris
Posted - 09/12/2009 : 00:26:27 Christgau can't buy a thrill, gotta walk it like he talks it
TJSAbass
Posted - 09/12/2009 : 00:20:04 Typical rock critic- it's all about the review, not the record. Too much frontal lobe. The MOR/anti-MOR comment is right on. I wonder though which Steely Dan record he's talking about?
