I noted in the previous entry for Dion how the tracks would have been better had they not been over-produced by Phil Spector. This. This is a perfect example of how sparse arrangement can elevate the emotion of a song so much more.
Smith starts the album with a cover of The Doors’ Gloria, which builds from a simple piano and vocal riff to an epic crescendo, Smith giving the kind of incoherent vocal utterances that Jim Morisson would do while writhing around suggestively on the floor. This is something that female vocalists have not really been “allowed” to do before – maybe Nina Simone in a jazzy kind of way, maybe Janis Joplin in a bluesy kind of way, but the women haven’t given into the kind of full loss of control that Smith does here.
She channels Morisson again in the epic Birdland, another builder that blends notions of death and grief with alien abduction, the song being taken up into the sky into a kind of ecstatic rapture. And brilliant it is. It’s another song (after Hawkwind’s Orgone Accumulator and Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting) inspired by Wilhelm Reich. On Break It Up, Smith sings while beating her chest to give a broken quality to the vocals.
“Ice it was shining . I could feel my heart it was melting I tore off my clothes, I danced on my shoes I ripped my skin open and then I broke through, I cried break it up, oh, now I understand”
From the cover photo, Smith leans into the androgyny that Bowie and Eno were doing from the other side, and she’s quite happy with the lyrics to the reggae-based Redondo Beach to be interpreted as lesbian. The whole album is delightfully iconoclastic while using sophisticated art-rock forms in many of its songs. If Kristin Hersh of Throwing Muses doesn’t cite this album as a source of inspiration, I’ll be very surprised.
After a run of albums that largely left me uninspired (even my beloved Pink Floyd), I was beginning to worry that I was becoming jaded with music, but this one restored my faith.
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