Album Reviews

This band of British rock and roll survivors led by David Gedge has been at it since 1985, releasing their debut LP George Best (named after a famous '60's era soccer star) two years later on their own Reception Records label.

Later, the band issued Tommy a collection of singles and unreleased tracks recorded for BBC's Radio 1. If that title strikes you as odd, not to mention having already been taken, there was also a Ukranian folk music side project dedicated to the late, great John Peel, who was an early supporter, but that's another story.

A few years later they signed with RCA (maintaining full artistic control) and in 1989 released Bizarro (RCA 21783-1R), which is where I caught up with them. Bizarro combines hard-edged guitar-driven punkish anger, puppy dog earnestness and a hetero version of Smith era Morrissey's romanticism leavened with a healthy dollop of wry humor.

Sadly I lost track after Bizarro despite greatly enjoying it, and so missed the Steve Albini recorded Seamonster along with a series of line up, label and even name changes over and throughout the ensuing years—truly an indie band led by an indie-thinking Gedge. No surprise then that he is or was a fan of The Fall's Mark E. Smith, another gloriously independent, difficult and ageless rocker.

The current Wedding Present lineup has remained constant for a few years now and after gigging around Europe and North America, the band reunited with Steve Alibini to record El Rey, an album filled with considerably less anger and a great deal more droll humor compared to what you'll find on Bizarro but an album on which the surely middle-aged by now Gedge mostly wears his heart on his sleeve as proudly as any teenager might, which is one attractive trait the Brits have that Americans don't seem to possess. It's the one that lets a guy from this age group still rock effectively without sounding out of place and maybe even silly.

With a single called 'The Thing I Like Most About Him is His Girlfriend,' you just know you're in for some self-deprecating, sly laughs and the album's got them along with heartaches pleading and "please take me back"s.

The instrumentation is guitar driven and edgy, the production values raw and basic and though it harks back to 1980's and even earlier musical values, the record sounds positively modern and definitely refreshing compared to much of the current rock dross and mannered indie stuff. This is what The Strokes aimed for and mostly missed.

Gedge has been living in Los Angeles (hence the album title, a famous Deco L.A. movie theater) and more than the Basin references sprinkled throughout the lyrics and song titles, the album has that dreaded and intense "been seduced, loved and dumped" experience only L.A. manages to produce. The record may have been produced in Chicago, but it feels like L.A.—or at least the L.A. I knew back when I lived there in (when else?) the 1980's.

The second tune 'Spider Man On Hollywood,' sums up the L.A. experience of things being not what they seem, as well, if not better than anything I've heard on the subject in years. Before I get to Gedge's take, let me relate one of my early L.A. experiences: within weeks of moving out there I hit Melrose Avenue and came upon a scene I'd seen in the movies and on television countless times: a cop with a rifle pointed, using the front door of his black and white (cruiser) for cover while a helicopter hovered overhead. Now this is something you simply don't see in real life so my first thought was 'Cool, they're filming a movie!' But of course 'they' weren't! This was an unfolding crime scene.

Anyway, Gedge sings in 'Spider Man On Hollywood' about things not being what they seem, in an endless series of humor-laden disappointments: 'I thought I saw a supermodel but she had hair where I don't think she should.'

'Things can be a parody of what they first appear to be,' Gedge cautions, adding 'I thought I saw a flying saucer last night, but of course it was just an aeroplane,' and 'I thought I saw Winona Ryder but my eyes were playing tricks again' and so on, in a song that's as understatedly funny and pointed as much of what Ray Davies wrote in his prime.

When Gedge drops to his knees on 'I Lost the Monkey,' pleading earnestly 'I just want you back,' you'll bite and you'll hear how Coldplay's Chris Martin could take the song and make it icky but also make it a pop hit. It's better heard here— not that there's anything wrong with Coldplay in my book.

El Rey is all about the primal power and the ultimate expressiveness of guitar driven rock as expressed over the years by The Smiths, the V.U., XTC and others and in that it retains both a modern and a classic feel of a form that's difficult to produce without sounding either old-hat or terribly derivative. The Wedding Present and Albini make it sound vital, up to date and timeless.

On 'The Trouble With Man,' Albini gets a drum and guitar sound that's dark, soupy and swampy, yet perfectly atuned to the intentions of the song. In fact, his entire production strategy seems to be to have the instruments and voices emerging from what feels like the dark, mysterious and wet L.A. primordial mist familiar to anyone who's spent time there living, loving, getting seduced and dumped. 'Boo Hoo' indeed!