grez's Full Review: Big Swing Face by Bruce Hornsby
Bruce Hornsby is a musician of immense talent with a palmary knack for smart songwriting. Best known for his first bit hit single, The Way It Is (from the debut album of the same name), Hornsby’s more diverse work has been overlooked by the average radio listener, and that’s a shame; as with most musicians, his finest work is that which has not found much distribution on mainstream radio. Nevertheless, he continues to produce quality music without regard for current trends. That is, until now.
Many fans have complained that the last three or four albums (the post “and The Range” era) have been too lacking in direction, too jam-oriented. It is true that in the past few years Bruce has turned to a more self-indulgent writing and musical style, which comes as no surprise due to his touring ties with the Grateful Dead in the mid-nineties. Many find this neo-hippy style appealing, others consider it rambling and unnecessary, but regardless of opinion, it can certainly be said that his recent work lacked conceptual cohesiveness.
Big Swing Face sees Bruce Hornsby deliberately avoiding the omnium gatherum feel of the last few collections and concentrating on giving the album a continuous vibe and theme. Unfortunately, the direction of the production on this album smacks of following fad in a number of ways, which really reduces the appeal. The intent is obvious: to strive for a collection that is edgy and artfully bohemian. Instead, the result is a robotic, overzealous, coffeehouse-techno-night effect. But let’s begin, as they say, at the beginning....
The year is 2002, and there is a horrifying trend in the music industry to take a perfectly good song and add all sorts of electronic zips and zings and superfluous bogus-sounding drum machine percussion. Bruce Hornsby is generally above such nonsense, but somehow his producer David Bendeth (who also produced crap-rock for SR-71 and Vertical Horizon) managed to convince Bruce to “dublocize” (yes, my own term) his sound. It is an obvious and shameful attempt at marketing Hornsby to a new and younger crowd. This trend continues throughout the production of the album, from the lyrical jargon to the cover art to the liner notes from Chip DeMatteo (who also wrote promo stuff for the Grateful Dead in their later years). DeMatteo throws around phrases like “blue idiom” and “universes full of light-years” in poetry-night style, all the while making random references to jazz greats as if by saying these things, it will save the listener from the mechanical quality of this album. Name-dropping may impress the unconversant kids, but it won’t gain any credibility with those of us who are versed veterans in the music world.
The impression here should not be that this album has no redeeming qualities; there are certainly moments of creative brilliance and experimentation. Bruce branches out to play some Mellotron and Fender Rhodes, lending a certain late 60’s vibe to many of the songs, and frequently the guitars are processed in that hippy jam band manner (clean sounds with reverb or some phaser/flange). It’s nice to hear Hornsby try out new musical textures and play some electronic keys instead of purely piano, but the problem lies in the fact that in doing so he’s given up the piano entirely on the album. You know things may get ugly when the liner notes themselves say “Bruce Hornsby plays Baldwin pianos, but not very much on this record.”
Almost nothing on the album is “left alone.” Few acoustic instruments are used (or if they are, can’t be heard), and synthesizer layers abound. Real drums are used on most of the tracks, but are then often doubled with electronic percussion. In the end, the whole works feels overprocessed, overgimmicked, and certainly overproduced.
Despite the previous unabashed criticism of the overall sound of Big Swing Face, there are several nice moments on the album:
Highlights & Near Misses
· Stick & Stones – the lyrical wordplay here is smart and catchy as hell. The melody itself, while not incredible, is fairly appealing, having a funky, bluesy quality to the verses and an almost chanted chorus. It feels like a single, and if this had been an experimental exception to the rest of the album, it would seem creative indeed.
· The Chill – more soulful than other tracks despite the awful programmed percussion and cheesy horn synth on the chorus. Not a lot of depth to the theme in the lyrics, but a good overall performance.
· Big Swing Face – features a really enjoyable intro riff; it is funky, fuzzy, and trippy. There is a distinct Middle-eastern influence in this song. The percussion and guitar work at the end of the song is also interesting. The lyrics display a good insight as to what makes people laugh.
· This Too Shall Pass – is both the strongest song on the album and the biggest disappointment. The song itself is gorgeous. A ballad, it starts in a soulful manner with smart lyrics: “Got to get something done today / Give accomplishment a shot / Might not have a full palette to use / But I’m gonna paint with the colors I’ve got.” Then a horrifying techno beat comes slamming in and turns this beautiful tune into a Boy-Band-cum-Radiohead disaster. I would love to see Hornsby re-record this song with acoustic instruments and without all of the garbage overdubs.
· No Home Training – sticks with almost straight blues and funk. This track was primarily written by one Floyd Hill – Hornsby was the secondary writer. The lyrics are a sort of warped version of traditional blues lyrics. The track is fairly strong, but I still can’t determine why the vocals are so processed…it detracts from the honesty of the song.
· Place Under The Sun – sounds like a remix version of a Black Crowes song with Bruce Hornsby on vocals. It features strong lyrics (who else rhymes nihilism, jingoism, and hypnotism all in the same verse?) and is more appealing than most of the rest of the album, but it still sounds a bit forced. The fuzzed-out guitar works well on this track.
Nuclear Disasters
· Cartoons & Candy – features irritating dubbed percussion like a new post-jazz-phase-now-I’m-a-pop-star Sting single. The lyrics are completely obtuse: “I’m feeling like such a mannish child / bottlenecking while I’m eating gummy fleas.” What in the hell does any of this mean?
· Try Anything Once – unfortunately, Bruce does just that. This song is just plain bad. It starts with a stupid rap near the beginning of the song, and things just go downhill from there. There is a goofy synthesizer chord roll on the chorus -– very eighties -– and this adds to the overall impression that the song was arranged by one of N’Sync’s songwriters. Again, there are lyric issues in that they don’t make sense; the verses are about letting issues roll off your back, but the chorus is about keeping an open mind. Hmmm…
· Take Out The Trash – while this track does contain some interesting verse lyrics – poetic in an urban sort of way – it is light on musical creativity. Partway through, the listener is jarred by the laughable synthesized steel drums, which then lead into a boring organ jam. Bruce is capable of much better.
· The Good Life – contains the age-old theme of “money can’t buy happiness.” It addresses the topic from the tongue-in-cheek perspective of a person that thinks that maybe, just maybe, the pundits were wrong. This is a fairly creative take on a universal theme. It’s too bad that the music sucks. The chorus is dull and features near-rhymes that are simply not justifiable given the monosyllabic words being rhymed. The melody is predictable and pedestrian.
· So Out – is bizarre to say the least. Lyrically, this song has to have been inspired by a drug trip (methinks Bruce hung out with the Deadheads a bit much). Try this on for size: “Silver streamers streaking strangely / Swirling savage savants grazing / Smoking on a pink pacifier / Genitalia in a hair dryer.” Ok, so Bruce said “genitalia.” It’s funny. Once. While this song is more cohesive than some of its brethren, it still leaves the listener with the impression that it’s totally random; unfinished, perhaps. And, again, there is a perfectly good drum part, but they (Bendeth, Hornsby, whoever) decided to sling some bad dub percussion over the top of it. Ick.
In the end, Big Swing Face leaves us, the listeners, with a scattered hodge-podge of sounds violently slapped on top of what could have been some pretty good songs. The songs are, at least, edited and do not run for several minutes on end through vacuous solos, which is the result of having brought in an outside producer who normally works with pop-rock radio musicians. Unfortunately, this same factor has resulted in an album that caters too much to current trends with its juvenile overdubbed sound effects and processing. It is, quite simply, overproduced. The many sides of Bruce Hornsby that matter, the spider-fingered wonder, the consummate musician, the introspective balladeer, are all buried under a sickly layer of syrupy techno-pop wizardry. With luck, Big Swing Face will be an accident of singular nature.
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Track Listing:
01 – Sticks & Stones
02 – Cartoons & Candy
03 – The Chill
04 – Big Swing Face
05 – This Too Shall Pass
06 – Try Anything Once
07 – Take Out The Trash
08 – The Good Life
09 – So Out
10 – No Home Training
11 – Place Under The Sun
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