headlessparrot's Full Review: Warpaint [Digipak] by The Black Crowes
As most music listeners are probably aware, a semi-controversy erupted recently over the Black Crowes’ most recent record. The music rag (‘magazine’ is a bit too generous) Maxim published a review of the whole album – 2008’s Warpaint – without ever actually hearing it in its entirety. Because the band hadn’t ever actually sent out promotional copies of Warpaint, it became clear that Maxim’s review of the whole record was based exclusively on the radio edit of its lead single, “Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution.” That, needless to say, is bad, especially after the magazine was caught doing the exact same thing again just weeks later, this time with the newest album by Nas. I’m of two minds about this controversy; part of me is appalled by the journalistic precedence that has been set. Another part of me notes that nowhere should the words “Maxim” and “journalism” appear in the same sentence (barring, that is, the presence of the crucial qualifier “is most certainly not”).
But shoddy journalism aside, what this controversy ignored, in my mind – and what seems so startlingly obvious that I can’t believe it has been ignored – is that writing a review of a Black Crowes album sight-unseen (or hearing-unheard, as it were) isn’t a totally unfair exercise, given that the Black Crowes have made a career out of releasing the exact same album over and over again. They’re like AC/DC, except less catchy, and far more aggravating. If Maxim should be derided for anything, it’s for even needing that first single at all to form an opinion. In fact, I’m positive that I could have written one of my usual 2000-word diatribes about Warpaint without hearing a note, and no one would be the wiser. I didn’t. But after actually listening to Warpaint, I have two observations to make: 1) I wish I hadn’t. 2) Regardless, I was correct.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the Black Crowes. Or at least I like the idea of the Black Crowes, which may be a roundabout way of saying that I liked the Black Crowes when I was fourteen years old and desperately in love with the idea of any modern band that had the balls to infuse the distinct sounds of classic rock that I was then enamoured with. The Crowes’ debut, Shake Your Moneymaker, was, at the time, one of my ten favourite albums ever. But asking a fourteen year old to list his ten favourite albums is probably not the most productive undertaking; for further proof, flip through your grade-and/or-high-school yearbooks, and notice what your peers selected as their favourite song (in grade school, I selected Metallica’s “One” – how adorable). And there is still, somewhere on this site, a very favourable review of Lions that I penned right around the same time I had decided Shake Your Moneymaker was one of my ten favourite albums. Such are the indiscretions of youth: the other children were out doing drugs and engaging in promiscuous sex while I was busy forming embarrassing opinions about mediocre albums. What’s worse is that I then proceeded to share those opinions.
But I digress. I realized at some point that I was listening to classic rock for its specificities, and not for some obtuse conception of its sound. It wasn’t that I’d fallen in love with a sound that was “earthy,” or “bluesy,” or “guitar-driven,” though all of those descriptors are used to capture the essence of classic rock (and of the Black Crowes), it was that I’d fallen in love with specific songs, and specific bands. Bands that wrote great songs and brilliant hooks, even apart from the relative “bluesiness” or “swagger” of their sound. And groups like the Black Crowes – who were adopting wholesale not just the quirks, but the very bedrock of classic rock – were mostly just cheating. If I like the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, the Faces, or the Allman Brother Band (the quartet of forebearers to which the Crowes, I would argue, owe their most obvious debts), in other words, there’s absolutely no reason for me to pay full-price to listen to a glorified cover band ape the Stones, Aerosmith, Faces, or Allman Brothers.
The Black Crowes’ sound and their musicianship are indeed hard to fault – they are very much a dead-on mimicry of those four aforementioned groups, and they’re more than capable musicians – but their songs just aren’t good enough to propel them into the upper echelon of the bands that they’ve made a career out of imitating. I don’t doubt their intentions; the Robinson brothers seem perfectly earnest, honest, and respectful about what they do. But I never doubted the intentions of Days of the New or (early) Silverchair either, which doesn’t say much for the strength of their output. It merely seems as though the continued existence of the Black Crowes is a modern marker by which fans of classic rock can set their watch: they illustrate the enduring brilliance of classic rock while also allowing exclusive fans of the genre to ignore their own progressive irrelevance. If you can cite one current band you like, I would suggest their thought process goes, it becomes more persuasive when you trash everything else about modern music. The Black Crowes, to put it bluntly, have become purveyors of “get of my lawn” rock and roll.
At least that’s what my critical impulse tells me. The truth is a bit blurrier. Shake Your Moneymaker is certainly no longer in my top ten albums, but it’s still an enduring piece of work for me, if only because it was a formative influence. It’s a decent, if somewhat inconsistent record, occasionally boring but overall pleasant enough. And the same can be said for most of their discography. Ironically, Lions may actually have become my favourite Black Crowes album in the intervening years, even though I’ve reached the point where that’s hardly saying much. It’s just weird enough, however, and just contemporary enough to be interesting, even from the perspective of someone who would prefer to get their classic rock from an actual classic rock band. Their record with Jimmy Page (Live At The Greek), additionally, is noteworthy because it abandons any pretence of integrity for what Crowes fans have (I suspect) always secretly longed to hear from them anyway: an actual classic rock band’s songs. And the results are nothing if not entertaining, which is pretty much the Black Crowes’ mission statement. But live performance (of other people’s songs, no less) and studio albums are two very different things.
I’ll be blunt. Warpaint – a reunion album of sorts, given that it saw the band in the studio for the first time since brothers Chris and Rich Robinson patched things up in 2005 - is an unrelenting, 53-minute disaster. Not because it’s completely, devastatingly awful, but because it’s every other Black Crowes album taken to a ridiculous level of absurdity: predictable, derivative, and bland. In its defence, Warpaint is certainly consistent: it’s just consistently boring, mind-numbingly so. I can deal with derivative, and I can deal with predictable, provided that you’ve got a set of good songs to work with. What I can’t put up with – what I won’t put up with, especially when I could just be listening to classic Stones or Faces – is boring. Warpaint is the session musician’s equivalent to an awful bar band, but at least the awful bar band has a bit of heart: Warpaint, musically, is immaculate – but it’s soulless and heartless. Rich Robinson’s guitar playing is wonderful, but his tone is mechanical. Indeed, the whole affair is mechanical. What’s remarkable is that those typical Black Crowe adjectives still seem to apply – “earthy,” “bluesy.” And yet I’ve never heard blues-rock played with less passion and conviction than it is on Warpaint. Likewise, I’ve never heard something “earthy” sounds so stilted and unnatural.
Most of the album is barely worth mentioning. Regrettably, I’m forced to mention a few songs for fear that my claim – that I could write a review without hearing a single song – would be taken seriously. That’s easier said than done, however, because Warpaint coasts along in a blur of mediocrity. The only two significant exceptions are the lead single, the aforementioned “Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution,” and one of a handful of requisite Black Crowes ballads, “Locust Street.” The former is a lumbering dinosaur of a mid-tempo rocker (albeit with some nice interplay between guitar and piano) that falls into the rut of everything the Crowes have ever done. It tries to exude a swagger, but its shifting melodies and stumbling rhythms reflect more uncertainty and trepidation than confidence. Robinson’s guitar solo is technically impressive but acoustically mired in the mud (as are large swaths of what is an atrociously produced, muddy album), and the whole procession is more flaccid than anything – like classic rock minstrelsy. “Locust Street,” by contrast, has a pretty acoustic accompaniment that’s ruined by Chris Robinson’s cartoonishly haggard voice and uncomfortable lyrics.
“Oh Josephine” is a low-rent “Girl From A Pawnshop” that (via the wonders of relativity) probably qualifies as Warpaint’s shining moment. Like “Locust Street,” Robinson’s guitar part isn’t the problem. In fact, the song features some tremendous guitar work, some of the best traditional rock guitar that I’ve heard since I last picked up a Crowes record (and his tone, at least here, isn’t an issue – the last minute of the song, entirely instrumental, is simply incendiary, proof of the band’s theoretical potential). It’s Chris’s strained braying that makes “Oh Josephine” feel so hackneyed and unconvincing. I’m sure there’s sincere sentiment here, but it’s buried under a troubling amount of schmaltz. Actually, there are moments on Warpaint where it seems as though the mixer were trying to de-emphasize Chris’s rock god melodrama. But the resulting mess (as heard on “Evergreen”) is maybe even worse. Chris is pushed back into the mix, and everything subsequently bleeds together into a muddy, cacophonous mess.
“We Who See The Deep” is embarrassing hippy tripe (Chris cringingly suggests his listeners “Let go of space and time”) set to another lumbering mid-tempo composition, while “Movin’ On Down The Line” is two minutes of pseudo-psychadelia glued to three of meandering blues-rock. “God’s Got It,” later, is another muddily produced number, set to a heavy-stomping rhythm. Album closer “Whoa Mule” is at least pretty – a blend of sweet slide guitar, bongos and harmonica, almost flawlessly arranged. Fortunately Chris, for once, plays it with a bit of subtlety. Unfortunately, it goes on about two minutes longer than it needs to, resolving in a vocal-heavy final verse that exposes the glaring inadequacies of Chris’s voice. What’s odd is that I rather like world-weary voices – Neil Young, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and various indie rock ne’er-do-wells – and I’ve never objected to Chris Robinson’s voice in the past. Yet his voice – somehow both nasally and with some throaty scratch – is absolutely painful throughout Warpaint. Perhaps it’s his insistence on full-out singing rather than emoting, as those other weak-throated vocalists do, but the results are just one in a list of reasons why it’s difficult to recommend Warpaint.
Cameron Crowe has said of the fictional band – Stillwater – featured in his film Almost Famous that, though a metaphorical stand-in for the enormous bands Crowe actually toured with in his youth, they were never meant to represent a great band. The irony of Lester Bang’s suggested article topic for young William Miller, “a think piece about a mid-level band struggling with their own limitations in the harsh face of stardom,” is that it was actually true. Stillwater was the embodiment of an average rock band in the 1970s – more Bad Company than Led Zeppelin – struggling with its own obvious limitations. That’s why, for those keeping score at home, the Stillwater songs that appeared in the film weren’t very good. It occurs to me, after hearing Warpaint and reflecting on their career, that the Black Crowes are a band very much in the Stillwater mould: musically capable, but in constant struggle with their plainly apparent creative shortcomings.
I suppose that the easiest way to put it is that Warpaint isn’t suffering from bad ideas, it’s suffering from no ideas. And in place of any ideas, the Robinson brothers have opted to notch up the classic rock cover band mimicry and hope that nobody notices. This isn’t, actually, an entirely bad choice, given that the Crowes’ core constituency is older white men trying to retain an element of their past – a group that, I figure, isn’t especially discerning (see also the continued popularity of Nugent, Ted). But for anyone who isn’t part of that audience, Warpaint is an embarrassing caricature of what was so likeable about the Black Crowes in 1990. As someone who has drifted away from no-nonsense, get-your-fingers-dirty rock music in the last five years, I wanted to like it. But even with my tremendous penchant for cognitive dissonance, I couldn’t convince myself that Warpaint is anything more than another poorly conceived – though admittedly well-rehearsed – reunion album.
From the beginning, The Black Crows have done things their own way. Warpaint is the band s first album of all-new studio material in seven years. Chri...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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