Categories : Miscellany, Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 1 / 5 Reviewer: Kevin Hartford |
Imelda Marcos was once the First Lady of the Philippines, though she’s remembered primarily for owning several thousand pairs of shoes. She rivaled Marie Antoinette in her ability to waste taxpayer money and contributed significantly to the billions of dollars in debt her husband racked up during his twenty years in office. David Byrne’s new album, Here Lies Love, a collaboration with Fatboy Slim and a bevy of notable female musicians, shows similar tendencies toward unnecessary excess: twenty-two songs spread out over two discs, and a special edition version of the album with a hundred-page booklet and a DVD containing six music videos.
Love is a concept album about Marcos’ life, and, like Marcos herself, it’s a spectacular failure in every respect. An attempt to meld two niche genres – disco and Broadway musical – it manages to capture only the abrasiveness of the former and the cornball cheesiness of the latter. The lyrics are banal and they’re sung over unimaginative, repetitive music. Hear thirty seconds of any song and you don’t really need to listen to the rest – there is nothing unique or challenging here. This is dentist’s-office music.
Each track features a guest vocalist, and Byrne and Slim have gathered an impressive collection of singers from across the world to bring their by-the-numbers songwriting to life: France’s Camille Dalmais, Sweden’s Theresa Andersson, Australia’s Sia Furler, and Filipino jazz singer Charmaine Clamor, who does an admirable job on the verses of ‘Walk Like A Woman’ until the chorus turns the song into cruise ship material. Americans making an appearance on Love include Cyndi Lauper, Tori Amos, St. Vincent, Alison Moorer, the B52s’ Kate Pierson, and, as the sole male contributor, Steve Earle, who comes across as a low-rent Bruce Springsteen here.
The lyrics are both lazy and dumb. British singer Florence Welch describes a “simple country girl who had a dream” on the album’s title track. Natalie Merchant sings “I thought I ordered coffee, but they gave me 7-Up” on the laughably political ‘Order 1081.’ And on Here Lies Love‘s first single, ‘Please Don’t,’ hip hop artist Santi White (Santigold) informs listeners that “the world is full of intolerance.” None of the album’s lyrical content rises above junior-high levels of profundity.
Here’s the thing: David Byrne is a smart guy. A talented one, too. It’s entirely possible that everything on Love was meant to be steeped in irony – the idea of Marcos, the shoe lady, being the subject of any work of art would indicate the concept was never intended to be taken seriously, and Love originated as a stage show, which would imply over-the-top theatrics were always part of the deal. Irony can only carry you so far, however, and removed from the context of a live performance, Here Lies Love is a bloated, overly generic waste of time. Paring the double album down to a single disc may have helped slightly, but it wouldn’t have saved the musical content from being almost offensively pedestrian. Stay far, far away.
