“What becomes a legend most?” Melora Creager muses in “The Olde HeadBoard,” the booty-shaking baroque ‘n’ roll track that opens Rasputina’s sophomore album. If the Brooklyn “ladies’ cello society” is to achieve iconic status, it’s doing the most becoming thing already, draining the same vein it opened in 1996 with “Thanks for the Ether.” Comprising three cellists decked out in Victorian corsets and lace and their pet drummer, Rasputina concocts such rich, nuanced chamber rock that it’s a wonder boys ever bothered with that guitar nonsense at all.
Creager and cello-mates Julia Kent and Agniezska Rybska, abetted by skin-pounder/programmer Chris Vrenna, construct lush harmonies and intricate interweavings of sawed and moaning strings, veering from the pounding power chords and sampled stadium roar of “Leech Wife” to a narcotic string-plunking cover of the Lesley Gore hit “You Don’t Own Me.” Creager’s girlish vibrato wafts trippingly over an elegant ballroom melody of the delicate “Rose K.” As did the band’s first CD, “Forest” includes a few surrealistic spoken-word numbers. In a childlike voice, Creager details grotesque exorcism treatments over mannered, courtly strings on “Christian Soldiers” and rambles distorted over jerky cello moans and programmed machine noises on “Dwarf Star.” “Diamond Mind” is a Fran Drescher-voiced torrent of avarice.
The disc sags in the middle, weighed down by the bombastic “TrenchMouth” and maudlin ethereal trifles “Sign of the Zodiac” and “Herb Girls of Birkenau.” Only Creager’s blasi intonation saves “MayFly” from fluttering into Enya territory. But if there’s a sophomore slump evident, it’s a small one indeed. And after all, as Creager warbles in the title track, “The scene is not what it used to be/The scene is never what it used to be.”
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Dr. John
ANUTHA ZONE | VIRGIN/POINTBLANK
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–>BY SETH MNOOKIN | Spiritualized. Paul Weller. Primal Scream. Supergrass.
Not exactly the first ingredients that come to mind when adding flavor to a steaming pot of psychedelic, Professor Longhair-style, voodoo gris-gris gumbo. So what’re they doing on Dr. John’s new effort, “Anutha Zone”? Is he making a growling plea for relevance?
Well, no. Maybe the good doctor just wanted to show the young Brits how they do it, N’awlins style. And on tracks aptly titled “Ki Ya Gris Gris,” “I Like Ki Yoka” and “Sweet Home New Orleans,” he does exactly that. “Anutha Zone” is a glorious, thick, funky, languid collection, showing once again that three decades after he confounded hippies and roots-freaks alike, there is only one Mac Rebannack.
From the brief but soulful, teasing “Zonata,” the solo piano piece that starts the album, to the rolling bass, pedal-steel guitar, emphatic organ lines and sly, trademark growling delivery that run throughout the album, “Anutha Zone” is a delicious mixture of wink-wink humor, ass-shaking horn sections and Dr. John’s peculiar brand of social commentary. Conjuring the voodoo gods, Dr. John sounds as strong and as committed to the murky, shudderingly soulful, slowed-down funk of New Orleans as ever. Praise Kiwa Kiya, indeed.
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MC Lyte
SEVEN AND SEVEN | ELEKTRA/EASTWEST RECORDS
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BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS | In an era when Brandy and Monica’s cuddly single “The Boy Is Mine” counts as a savage catfight, does an ornery soul like MC Lyte’s still have a place in pop? In the best moments on her new album, “Seven and Seven” — songs like “Too Fly” and “Want What I Got” — Lyte cracks jokes, snaps skulls and laughs off the competition like it’s 1989. You get the feeling that if she decided the boy were hers, there wouldn’t even be a debate.
Guest producer Missy Elliott plays half-speed double-dutch with the drums, stretching junglist rhythms into long, funky exhalations, and Lyte’s voice, a Brooklyn growl that remains as scratchy and vibrant as an old-school bass line, bobs and weaves through the spaces. But Lyte really needs somebody like Missy in her corner — Elliott only contributes to four tracks, and the rest of “Seven and Seven” (save a couple memorably crude rhymes, like the one about the erotic potential of Twister) is catchy, but never compelling. It’s an attempt at party-friendly jiggy-ness so forced it feels court-mandated.
Lyte can deliver a throwaway line like “How simple did it seem/to smudge my Maybelline?” with a calm confidence that makes Rakim sound like Don Knotts. But even she can’t redeem reheated disco like “Party Goin’ On” or the post-Puffy cheese slice “Put It on You.” Her badass presence becomes a liability — as she strains for another “Cold Rock a Party,” you can hear all that power going to waste.
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Silkworm
BLUEBLOOD | TOUCH & GO
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BY ANDREW HAMLIN | Distill down the murky, fuming spirits the Rolling Stones played with on “Exile on Main Street”; leave in the rooster-proud boogie-choogle guitar riffs; replace Charlie Watts’ spritely and soulful percussion with Mike Dahlquist’s sense of attacking cymbals and toms as though each beat was the last waking breath of a brokenhearted drunk falling asleep in a Dumpster; twist the bass guitar (courtesy head honcho Tim Midgett, who also plays “baritone and regular guitar”) into a rubbery burble. That’s the sound of Silkworm’s latest record. Midgett sings ragged and artless in the accepted indie style, but an endearing half-resigned, half-yearning melancholy is all he needs to put the wry words across (and unlike “Exile,” this paean to dissipation comes with a lyric sheet). In “Said It Too Late” a girl congratulates the singer on his soulfulness; “That’s just the blues I heard from the English dudes,” he confesses, though not to her. “Beyond Repair” touches a stained hand to the Beach Boys too, concluding with this homage/mission statement: “Love, sister, is just a kiss away/when it exists it just comes one day/Until then, sit on your hands and wait.”
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Randy Scruggs
CROWN OF JEWELS | REPRISE
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BY JOHN MILWARD | Randy Scruggs is one of the hidden masters of contemporary Nashville. The son of banjo virtuoso Earl Scruggs, he cut his teeth playing guitar in his father’s band before becoming a prominent session player and producer. Scruggs played on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s seminal 1972 collection, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a folksy round robin that introduced the rock community to such country, folk and bluegrass luminaries as Merle Travis, Doc Watson and Maybelle Carter. Scruggs himself produced 1989′s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Volume Two,” which expanded the pickin’ party to include such contemporary voices as John Hiatt, Rosanne Cash and John Prine.
“Crown of Jewels” is Scruggs’ first solo album, but with a guest list nearly as long as that of the “Circle” collections, it’s a work that similarly argues that a gifted musician best shines in the company of equally talented peers. The result, however, is that the collection reflects Scruggs’ tastes and talents as a producer more than it establishes his own artistic stamp. His collaboration with Mary Chapin Carpenter, “It’s Only Love,” softens Carpenter’s typically frosty presentation, and if recruiting Travis Tritt to sing a sweetly rocking rendition of the old Pure Prairie League hit “Aime” seems like a rather transparent commercial ploy, the pairing of Emmylou Harris and Iris DeMent to harmonize on the traditional “Wildwood Flower” is simply sublime.
The true riches in “Crown of Jewels” are found in the unassuming virtuosity of the players. The album opens with Scruggs and Vince Gill trading guitar lines on “A Soldier’s Joy,” and soars on “Travel On,” a Southern-rock instrumental in which Scruggs’ electric lead tangles with Lee Roy Parnell’s slide guitar and Bruce Hornsby’s piano. It ends with Scruggs playing a lovely solo guitar arrangement of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” Clearly, Scruggs is not one to make radical, groundbreaking music. Instead, he seeks new ground by finding new ways to make his traditionalist strings sing.
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Geri Allen
THE GATHERING | VERVE
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BY J. POET | Pianist Geri Allen is as familiar with funk and the blues as she is with free-flowing hard bop, and on “The Gathering” she gets a chance to showcase her diverse playing and compositional expertise. On “Light Matter,” Allen, along with bassist Buster Williams and drummer Lenny White, explores a whole palette of textures, time signatures and colors, as if presenting a musical explanation of the way light travels through the universe, while the soothing synthesizer lullaby “Baby’s Breath” showcases the subtle side of Allen’s phrasing and control.
Allen’s risumi includes work with Dewey Redman, Ornette Coleman and Me’shell N’degeocello. This set includes duos, trios and small band configurations, and features stellar players like ex-Living Color guitarist Vernon Reid, who brings a flamencolike flair to his work on “Ray,” a meditation for piano, guitar and sparse percussion, and trombone player Robin Eubanks, featured on the title track, a piece that follows black music from West Africa to the bright lights of Broadway. Like Monk and Coltrane, Allen has a unique ability to use avant-garde ideas in a manner that makes them accessible, without robbing them of their power to impress and inspire.
jackie Chan is, bar none, the world’s greatest action hero. The most popular star in Asia, in the U.S. he was the exclusive property of art-house brats and kung fu buffs until 1995, when “Rumble in the Bronx” was spruced up for American release, paving the way for three more recycled releases (so far) and a promising new career in Mountain Dew commercials. Now 43, the Hong Kong legend still does all his own stunts, which range from impressive to insane, and is blessed with a near-flawless sense of comic timing. He maintains an impish, regular-Joe air that makes his more absurd plot devices or goofy schticks forgivable. Most endearing is his habit of adding a montage of bloopers to the end credits, showing him bumping into pillars, making funny faces to get a baby to laugh for the inevitable stroller-in-traffic scene or falling from a great height and injuring himself.
His latest offering is actually a 1991 film originally called “Armour of God II: Operation Condor,” co-written and directed by Chan. It’s far from his best work, and holds together about as well as a Clinton cabinet, but it’s still thoroughly entertaining. There’s no reason to be deterred by the fact that it’s a sequel; the skeletal plot carries nothing over from 1986′s “Armour of God,” and the skinny is laid out in some clumsy expository dialogue toward the beginning. The U.N. wants Jackie — a Chinese Indiana Jones, minus any discernible profession — to find 240 tons of Nazi gold buried beneath the Sahara before a pack of international terrorists does. Tagging along are Carol “Dodo” Cheng as Ada, a Chinese U.N. attachi specializing in African desert environments, and Eva Cobo De Garcia as Elsa, leggy blonde granddaughter of the Nazi who hid the gold. For no particular reason, they also pick up Momoko (Shoko Ikeda), a Japanese hippie wandering through the desert. The three women serve as comic relief, running around in towels that are repeatedly dropped to distract baddies, misfiring weapons, getting kidnapped by bandits and put up for auction and squealing a lot. And whenever the dumb-gal jokes begin to wear thin, bumbling, bickering Arab gunmen Tasza and Amon (Jonathan Isgar and Daniel Mintz, a couple of unshaven white guys in turbans) show up and attack our heroes.
“Condor” lacks the spectacular stunts of “Super Cop” or the amazing martial arts action of Chan’s “Drunken Master” movies, but it squeezes in an over-the-top motor scooter chase and a half-flying battle in a wind tunnel. It is perhaps questionable judgment to place the best scene — which involves cultural misunderstandings with a tribe of lampshade-headed cave-dwellers and Chan rolling down a mountain face in a giant inflated sphere — before the opening credits. But the rest of the movie keeps us entertained with its Nazis, huge mechanical traps, brutal henchmen with Amish beards, and more superstitious tribesmen than you can shake a spear at.
What carries the movie are the stunts — an art being not-so-slowly subsumed by tech wizardry nowadays — the slapstick, and an odd sort of warmth. The heroes and villains may not be nuanced, but they’re human. In American action flicks the characters are given a few quirks to suggest individuality, but they still make the same ridiculous mistakes as their counterparts in a dozen other movies. Chan doesn’t bother to give the characters specific qualities or histories to round them out — they’re just there to fulfill a role, and don’t pretend otherwise — but they use a refreshing amount of common sense. During a spectacular fight spent jumping from one high, tilting giant grate to another, Jackie and his three opponents look down and see a sizzling red-hot grill far beneath them, waiting for someone to fall onto it. The four stop, look at each other, and silently agree to postpone the battle until they’re back on solid ground.
To find Jackie Chan in theaters all over the country is a treat after all this time, but the revamped, dubbed version of “Condor,” oddly, does not translate as well as his other old subtitled prints. About 20 minutes have been trimmed from the film’s midriff and are not missed. But the computer-generated main title sequence is annoyingly choppy, and Stephen Endelman’s Kraftwerk-lite score is no great shakes. The dubbing is distressingly clumsy — not as bad as the stereotypical Japanese monster movie, but far worse than the sanitized-for-your-protection dialogue in in-flight features. It’s synchronized to the sentence, but not to the word. Most of the voices used are fine — although everyone has an American accent except the ex-Nazi terrorist Adolf (who has a slight pan-European lilt), the stereotypical Moroccans and Jackie (Chan’s own voice, thank God) — but it’s easier to get past the script’s hokeyness when it’s flashing across the bottom of the screen, removed from the action. Those countless cries of “Jackie, save me!” sound so much more dramatic in Cantonese.
Whatever you expect of a band called Fuck, it probably isn’t this. Though the name may suggest a garage punk group, the San Francisco combo is a more slow and languorous Fuck than one might expect. “Pardon My
French,” the foursome’s third full-length CD and its first on Matador, is a lazy, hazy progression of mellifluous melodies and an excellent introduction to the band. It lacks the cute packaging of previous releases — “Pretty… Slow” came in a box with little toys and a coloring book, and “Baby Loves a Funny Bunny” was packaged as a giant matchbook — but though both are well worth heavy rotation, “Pardon My French” coheres better as an album. In fact, it’s not immediately apparent on first or second spin whether a song has ended or merely moved on to another stage, as half the songs are less than two and a half minutes long.
It’s music for sleepyheads, soporific and yet far from boring. Beneath, or rather over, guitarist Timmy Prudhomme’s softly murmured lyrics, the band mixes lo-fi indie-rock instrumentation with folk and country structures and a hazy shade of psychedelia, like the view from deep underwater on a sunny day — at times sounding like Pink Floyd without the soaring guitar solos, at others like Robyn Hitchcock in his more airy numbers or Babe the Blue Ox’s labyrinthine rhythms.
The quality that distinguishes Fuck from all the other muted, groggy heroin-rock bands around is that its songs never dissolve into blobby muck; so many bands just pile the reverb and effects on and let the ear sort ‘em out, whereas Fuck uses just enough instrumentation — an echoing electric guitar note here, some organ there — to keep the melodies crisp and distinct amid the jangling and burbling and mumbling. The most pared-down numbers are the strongest, like the delicate flamenco guitar and softly moaning violin on “Compromise,” or the old-time acoustic guitar-and-kazoo ditty “Raggy Rag.”
The divide between the acoustic and electric numbers is a subtle one, as Fuck doesn’t indulge in the guitar wanking that a lot of bands do to spice up their albums or sets, which often sounds as hokey and boring as the “obligatory ballad” does, only louder. These guys don’t show off. They don’t rock out. Even the more upbeat numbers, like “To My Gurl” and “Fuck Motel,” are subdued and throbbing. The former has a Doors-like wild keyboard solo, but its li’l burst of chaos is quickly subsumed into Ted Ellison’s bass in the meandering instrumental “Thoroughfare,” supplemented by bits of tinkling piano and occasional R&B horns.
The lyrics tend to soften the sound further still. Leaving aside a whole song in baby talk (and French) like “Scribble Dibble,” the songs have a tender, introspective lilt, like “Raggy Rag”: “Wake up where we belong/Down below the deep blue me/That’s where my love goes wrong/Can’t they please get a two-dollar kiss from me?” “Compromise” takes a darker turn: “I’ve compromised myself enough/To know when someone else has given up/I waste my time on childish rhymes/You say you’ve had enough.”
“Is obscene a dirty word?” Prudhomme sings in “Dirty Brunette.” “Can you take the time to show me?/And if I hurry toward the earth/Will you be the one to slow me?” Fuck doesn’t need much slowing, but it’s as far as one could get from obscene. In a better world than our own, Fuck would be all over the radio dial. Alas, on our slowly spinning sphere, it remains the band that dares not speak its name.
Perhaps it had to happen. If Pat Boone could cut a heavy metal
album, a platter of Sinead O’Connor hymns couldn’t be far behind. But no, Sinead hasn’t converted to Christian Rock. The 30-year-old Irish Catholic-cum-Buddhist’s new six-song EP of original spirituals points rather toward a vague pagan pantheism, with no ready answers, but a doggedconviction that things will somehow turn out for the best.
“Gospel Oak,” O’Connor’s first release since 1994′s “Universal Mother,” is more consistent than her recent endeavors — the baffling collection of too-big-band versions of white-guy standards, “Am I Not Your Girl,” and the odd jumble of the redemptive and the irredeemable on “Universal Mother.” In fact, it’s almost too consistent.
Three consecutive tracks are chants thinly disguised as pop songs. Each line of “I Am Enough for Myself” follows the same chord progression as the last, trudging along, unchanging, a steady mantra of self-sufficiency. But then “Petit Poulet” (that’s “Little Chicken” to you) begins, and it’s exactly the same — the tempo picks up soon enough, but it maintains that circular lack of progress. A franglais lullaby for Rwanda (“Maintenant bebe/Tout sans, c’est OK”), the latter
song is much more interesting than the former. It contains some lovely images: “The sun’s still in the sky/The moon is there at night/The ground is still underfoot/And still holds you.” What’s more, it has some impressive accordion and African-style guitar action going during the doo-doo-doo chorus.
The Irish republican love song “4 My Love” breaks the musical monotone with military snare drum rolls, but it’s sung in a harmony-duet-with-self drone that maintains the trance.
Lest we bliss out entirely, we are granted a couple of gorgeous non-chants — the healing oath “This Is to Mother You” and “This IS a Rebel Song,” a plea to an unresponsive lover — which, truth to tell, also sound a lot alike musically, both sung in Sinead’s dulcet, hypnotic half-whisper. As a chaser, the EP includes an elegant, pared-down live
recording of the traditional Irish folk song “He Moved Through the Fair,” which she previously recorded with the Chieftains on their 1995 album “The Long Black Veil.” On this subdued new version, the keyboard and guitar accompaniment is merely a low murmur in the background as O’Connor’s acrobatic alto milks the hoary lay for all it’s worth.
The songs as a whole are very pretty, but lack the catharsis found in “Troy,” “Nothing Compares 2 U” or even “Red Football.” “Gospel Oak” may be spreading a sort of holistic good news, but it is not what we usually think of as gospel music. Gospel is born of joy, and while O’Connor may have gotten past some of the anger, hurt and sadness that pervaded her previous albums, joy is still foreign territory — what Sinead offers instead is a somewhat harried hope.
Great spirituals have sprung out of such fortitude
of soul for as long as anyone can remember, but hope-rock tends to lead one down the slippery slope into the shadowy valley of lite radio fare. Emotional instability may be the heart of rock ‘n’ roll — but if that’s so, maybe we’re better off with Enya or Yanni, a sobering thought indeed. I’m happy for Sinead’s sake that she’s got her Myoho-renge-kyo in motion, but musically I miss the howling.
Nick Cave’s work has always been deliciously grim. From his chaotic beginnings 17 years ago in the Birthday Party (a band whose albums were re-released last month on the Thirsty Ear label), the godfather of goth rock has mined the rich ore of blues, folk and pop and fashioned it into apocalyptic rockers and seductive dirges. The result sounds like the orgiastic love-child of Jim Morrison, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Edgar Allen Poe.
The Australian dean of despondency isn’t doing any screamin’ on his latest endeavor, “The Boatman’s Call.” The album maintains the air of mellow melancholia that has long loomed large in his work, but here it threatens to consume it. “The Boatman’s Call” is even more consistent in its dolorous drone than was last year’s aptly named “Murder Ballads,” which was as homogeneous musically as it was thematically. Most of the songs stand well on their own, but taken together, unrelieved by the pounding shouters that punctuated Cave’s previous discs, they dissolve into a threnodic torpor.
This low-key, stripped-down sound throws the limelight onto Cave’s lyrics, which are stronger and fresher than ever before. The grand tradition of English balladry aside, crises of love and faith make for more resonant songs than does senseless bloodletting, and Cave seems to be in the process of uncovering the roots of his macabre obsessions and revealing more of himself along the way. His language is as packed with biblical imagery as ever, but it seems more honest than his earlier intoxicating jaunts through the valley of the shadow of death.
In the throbbing folk song “West Country Girl,” Cave sings the praises of a ghoulish gal who “comes from the West Country, where the birds sing bass.” In “Idiot Prayer,” he asks a dead lover, “Is heaven just for victims, dear, where only those in pain go?” And in the tender, mellifluous love song “Into My Arms,” Cave croons, “I don’t believe in an interventionist God/But I know, darling, that you do/But if I did, I would kneel down and ask him/Not to intervene when it came to you/Not to touch a hair on your head/Leave you as you are/If he felt he had to direct you/Then direct you into my arms.”
“We’re crossing cold neurotic sea,” he murmurs in
“Far From Me,” and monotonous as it sometimes is,
the murky water below conceals riches that
reward the voyage.
When bands tour these days, it’s usually just to support their albums. Heavy rotation on MTV and your CD carousel is the goal, and the applause is incidental. With Jonathan Richman, the opposite is true: his albums are there to tide fans over until he next comes ’round to play. Richman is a traveling minstrel first, and a recording artist seemingly as an afterthought. Frequent his concerts, and you’ll see the same faces again and again; I know plenty of people who’ve never seen Jonathan live, of course, but I don’t know anyone who’s seen him only once.
Self-dubbed “the celebrity that nobody has ever heard of,” Richman has been doing his thing for a quarter century, and has amassed a die-hard if quiet following. His first band’s eponymous album, “The Modern Lovers,” was recorded in 1972 (largely by John Cale) and released by Beserkly Records in 1976, just three years after that particular lineup parted ways. (Richman was to use the name “the Modern Lovers” for almost every backup band he mustered, and members of the first incarnation went on to join the Talking Heads and the Cars.) Richman’s gone from being a gloomy protopunk Velvet Underground devotee — writing choppy songs like “Roadrunner,” covered by the Sex Pistols way back when — to playing quirky, largely acoustic tunes fed by calypso, country, and ’50s R&B. His songs celebrate the simple and the weird, from old jeans and corner stores to Van Gogh, Picasso, and Martian Martians.
Just as with lunatic-fringe singer-songwriters from Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen down to Tom Waits and Robyn Hitchcock, Richman’s voice can be an acquired taste. He croons in a nasal drawl, a bit slurred, often half-speaking the lines. There’s something sad and wistful about Jonathan’s lyrics — not the “she done me wrong” pathos of honky-tonk jukeboxes, but a sense of alienation and missed opportunities. At first, his songs sound corny, a bit too sentimental. And despite the rockabilly redux and hip-to-be-square lounge revival, if someone plays a Chuck Berry riff with a straight face these days, it’s usually at a wedding or bar mitzvah. But it’s hard to resist Richman’s quick wit and tight musicianship, his shy impishness and calculated childishness. The guy knows what he’s doing.
“Surrender to Jonathan,” Richman’s latest album (maybe his twentieth, depending on whom you ask), is also his Vapor Records debut, after nearly a decade on Rounder. After a number of years as a solo artist, on this album Richman plays his guitar accompanied by a full band, including Hammond organ, back-up singers, and brass.
“Surrender” reprises a few favorites, including 1977′s bouncy instrumental “Egyptian Reggae,” Richman’s biggest chart hit to date, and “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar” from 1992′s “I, Jonathan.” I’d already heard most of the “11 new songs” touted by the label, especially since several of them aren’t new at all. “When She Kisses Me” comes from “Having a Party With Jonathan Richman,” for example, and “To Hide a Little Thought” was on last year’s album, “You Must Ask the Heart.” Compared to the previously recorded acoustic solo version, “When She Kisses Me” sounds a little overproduced, as if Richman has to shout to be heard while the band rocks out. On the other hand, the wail of the Hammond spices up the funky disco number “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar,” and the schmaltzy lounge lament “To Hide a Little Thought” sounds more polished (and funnier) this time around.
In the liner notes to 1991′s “Having a Party…,” Richman wrote, “Once in a while a record comes along that is such a departure from the normal style of a singer that some explanation is in order. This record is not one of those. As far as I can tell, the style of singing, the melodies, and the lyrics are a lot like what I’ve been doing for the last ten years.” Richman may have solidified his groove long ago, but his songs sound as witty and fresh as ever, and his guitar playing is if anything getting ever more deft. The new gems uncovered include the swingin’ Gallic zydeco-cabaret number “French Style” and an upbeat, calypso-tinged fare-thee-well to a woman coming into her own, “Not Just a ‘Plus One’ on the Guest List Anymore.” The tender, reflective ode to parenthood “My Little Girl’s Got a Full Time Daddy Now” is overshadowed only by “Rock ‘n’ Roll Drummer Straight from the Hospy-Tel,” a hilarious ’50s-type boogie celebrating an all-too-familiar shambling rock archetype. “He’s such a little rock ‘n’ roll drummer/Skinny, frail/Keep him away from your niece and your daughter, too.”
The title track, “Surrender,” has grown on me. When I first heard it in concert a year or so ago, I thought it a mite sappy, but his goofiness and air of amused sincerity has finally won me over, making me heed the Gospel of Jojo: “Love has softened my heart and softened me / It’s softened my eyes on the things they see / And my cheek has got much softer to the touch / Since I learned to be receiver as well as sender / To win in love you must surrender.” Soon you, too, will surrender to Jonathan. Resistance is futile.
