From: owner-bklist-digest@smoe.org (bklist-digest) To: bklist-digest@smoe.org Subject: bklist-digest V3 #2 Reply-To: bklist@smoe.org Sender: owner-bklist-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-bklist-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "bklist-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. bklist-digest Friday, February 5 1999 Volume 03 : Number 002 Today's Subjects: ----------------- interesting "hunger" review [Mark Miazga ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 04 Feb 1999 03:24:50 -0500 From: Mark Miazga Subject: interesting "hunger" review Finally found some net resources for "Hunger"... a review at http://www.furia.com/twas/twas0207.html It's very well written. In fact, I'll copy it and send it on for those of you w/o web access. Here is is, by Glenn McDonald in _The War Against Silence_: Brenda Kahn: Hunger And maybe it's just the contrast, but after A Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of the Emotional Party, Brenda Kahn's fifth album, Hunger, doesn't sound nearly as depressing to me as did its two predecessors, Destination Anywhere and Outside the Beauty Salon. "I keep my best shoes on / For when the Messiah comes", explains the narrator of "Messiah", a charmingly irrelevant preparation for Armageddon. "Heaven's just the light / That shows you vice, / The dark sea coral castles in your heart.", offers the title track, an encouragingly symbiotic cosmology. "Queen of Distance" ends sadly, but where the couples on the last two albums were torn apart by self-destructiveness and sicknesses, the spaces between the Queen and her suitor are choreographed, as much part of the dance as their feints toward closeness. The baleful "So What If I Saw Jesus" conflates Christ and an abusive boyfriend, and ends up trying to sleep with them both. "Side Step the Bullet" is an elegy to a suicide, but the narrator's lingering image, "A broken record of what I never said / And stacks of what Rilke had to say" / Piled on the bed" diagnoses the death as something she failed to save him from, not something she drove him to, a distinction that won't help her through this grief, but might prevent the next one. "Dictaphone", my favorite text here, balances the "All you need is love" choruses with the leader's protest "I raised a flag, I raised an army / Just to keep your children fed", a frighteningly realistic explanation of how our collective needs subvert the peace we claim to long for. The spoken-word fragments that frame the songs, three scenes from a trip through Mexico, retrace some of Bruce Cockburn's poet-traveler steps, attempting to see them in warmer light. But my favorite theory for this album's infusion of possibility is that if you give it enough chances, self-awareness will always overtake depression. "The radio is filled with voices / That made mistakes", worries "Hunger", and I don't think Brenda wants to be just another one. "Do you write your problems down / And sell them for money?", she asks in "Messiah". It's a reasonably noble occupation, as occupations go, but if you write your problems down clearly enough, eventually your pen will start to show you ways out. Musically, Brenda makes Ian McNabb's six-day recording schedule look sluggish, slamming through this set in only two. Their core instrumental palettes are almost identical, Brenda relying on her acoustic guitar, Ernest Adzentoivich's acoustic bass (often bowed, to nice effect) and sparing extra-guitar assistance from producer Tim Bright, but Brenda seems to understand that making rock songs out of these elements requires some energy on her part, and so she compensates for the absent drums and amplifiers with her own intensity. Her guitar snaps and churns, fret buzz and the rasp of her arms against the body substituting for feedback and overdrive, and her voice slips from wispy sighs into an unguarded howl without warning, reminding me even more vividly of the Slingbacks than it did on her electric records. She still lets some of these songs stay reserved and quiet ("Messiah", "Hunger" and "Queen of Distance" are all droning and ominous), and the shuffling "Christopher Says" sounds like the soundtrack for a sinister Gorey animation, but I reach the end feeling that while these songs could have had other, noisier lives, if Brenda had wanted them to, and some day still might, they are also complete the way they are, not blueprints for something larger you have to close your eyes and hope you can imagine, looming over the real walls and roofs of your town. ------------------------------ End of bklist-digest V3 #2 **************************