Well now, there's a picture - the last
time I saw a photograph of a woman pulling a face like that it wasn't a keyboard
she was reaching for believe me. But anyway, another Hammond organ album then,
and my first question is going to be "what does this bring to the table that
all the others didn't"? And the answer is.....not a lot really, though I
will submit that, unlike most of the other Hammond themed albums I've come
across, on this one the organ is much more integrated into the band as a whole
rather than pushed up front as lead instrument. Which means calling this 'Magic
Hammond' is as accurate as describing 'Exile On Main Street' as a drumming album
by Charlie Watts.
Elsewhere though, we're far from the road less
travelled - a handful of familiar tunes are sprinkled in amongst a majority that
I don't know from Adam; the source of 'Unter dem Schottenrock ist gar nichts',
'Die Uhr geht vor du kannst noch bleiben' and the rest could be anything from
Christmas Carols to Nazi drinking songs and I'd be none the wiser, but there's
definitely something trippy about hearing the familiar melodies of 'Knowing Me
Knowing You' and 'Living Next Door To Alice' emerging from out of them,
lingering for a bit before dissolving back into the next faceless tune from
Tuetonia. Not that it matters - as is the wont with these things, each of the
tunes is cheerful enough to welcome any tourists and the band is very busy in
its business (including a rather clipped and funky bass), but that's about the
only emotion I can derive from any of this.
You see, I can only really regard this as something
designed to fill a space with music where there previously wasn't any. Nothing
more. True, if you broke it down you could say the same about all music from
Bach to The Beatles, that's it's little more than social Vaseline designed to
make this thing called 'life' a little bit more pleasant as we pass through it,
but those latter two artists - although wildly different in virtually every way
you can think of - created with an intent and sense of purpose, regardless of
whether this is recognised or appreciated by the listener. In contrast, 'Magic
Hammond 2' seems purposeless, sound for the sake of sound and even the keenest
shovel wouldn't find depth within these grooves.
That's ok though, not everyone needs to be - or
even can - be Bach; as Greil Marcus once pointed out, you can't criticise a
theme park for not being a cathedral. But then by giving me nothing to cling to,
nothing about this lingers when it's over. It leaves me with no sense of regret
that I hadn't heard it earlier and no sense of anticipation at the thought
of listening to it again. Ever. It's simply music that I have no use
for.
And almost in keeping with that 'just play once'
aura, the record has an in-built 'self destruct' booby trap in the form of a
date stamped deep into the run-out and counter to the groove; to put it mildly,
it would seriously damage any stylus that unwittingly came into contact with it.
I'd like to think this was a deliberate act of Situationist subversion akin to
Guy Debord's book 'Mémoires' being published with a rough sandpaper
jacket designed to damage any book either side of it on the shelf, but it's
probably just a final piece of utter cluelessness on behalf of the record label
(though I suppose it at least means that it does bring something new to
the table after all).
No comments:
Post a Comment