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Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Reissues

2013-02-09 20:31:00 (читать в оригинале)

At the turn of millennium, old-school Nick Cave fans had good reason to believe the singer's fiery heart had been extinguished by middle age. In 1997, at age 40, he released his most delicate, introspective album, The Boatman's Call, to universal acclaim, making it the go-to Nick Cave album for people who never really liked Nick Cave. And then, thanks to a sober-up sabbatical, the usually prolific songwriter took four years to follow it up with the ornate No More Shall We Part; by 2002, this one-time contemporary of Lydia Lunch and Swans was covering the Beatles' "e;Let It Be"e; alongside the likes of Sheryl Crow and Sarah McLachlan on the soundtrack to the Sean Penn TV-movie-of-the-week-style weepie I Am Sam. Cave had never made a secret of his admiration for the likes of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen; now, it seemed he was content to settle into a similar late-career routine of steadily releasing respectable albums that would allow him to grow old with his aging fans, rather than court new ones.

But if Cave's course seemed predetermined at the start of the decade, the final installments in Mute's 25th anniversary (28th anniversary by now) Bad Seeds reissue campaign cover a period of great upheaval and rejuvenation. Of course, the sense of rediscovery here is undermined by the fact that these records are still in print and fresh in memory, and the trajectory they chart feels incomplete without the inclusion of Grinderman, the more feral Bad Seeds offshoot that formed over this span. But, collectively, these records provide rare evidence of a band that continues to produce to career-besting work well into their third decade.  And as per the series standard, each album here has been repackaged with B-sides, 5.1-channel stereo DVD audio mixes, videos, and the final chapters of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's always-illuminating talking-head documentaries Do You Love Me Like I Love You-- albeit, sadly, with 90% less Blixa.

At the very least, these reissues should reassert the importance of Nocturama in the Bad Seeds canon, given that the album's jarring stylistic shifts were initially greeted with an equally divisive reception. Where No More Shall We Part reasserted the Bad Seeds' rock-noir majesty in gradual, controlled gestures, Nocturama is more like a loosely screwed light bulb that flickers on and off in spurts. Eight of its 10 songs capture Cave in piano-man crooner mode, at times to overly sentimental effect-- see: "e;Rock of Gibraltar"e;, a song destined to go down as Cave's "e;Mull of Kintyre"e;. But Nocturama marked the start of a fruitful reunion between Cave and his Birthday Party producer Nick Launay, and is ultimately remembered for its two outliers: the Grinderman dry-run "e;Dead Man in My Bed"e; and the incomparable "e;Babe, I'm on Fire"e;, a breathless 15-minute, 38-verse tour de farce that provides a peak-power showcase of both the Bad Seeds' sleazeball swagger and Cave's peerless wordsmithery. It is, in essence, a love song to kill all other love songs, personifying the manic ecstasy of romance through kinship with an "e;unlucky amputee,"e; "e;menstruating Jewess,"e; "e;rapist on a roll,"e; and 100-plus other wayward souls seemingly on-call from some bizarro-world reality-TV show.

Beyond reawakening the Bad Seeds' inner beast, Nocturama signaled a shift in Cave's songwriting perspective. His lyric sheet up to that point had been mostly a pastiche of old-school signifiers, drawing on the blues, the Bible, and the Beats. But Nocturama revealed a growing interest in the modern world, America specifically. And while Cave's work has never been lacking for black humor, Nocturama evinced a greater willingness to embrace the absurd (as epitomized by the outrageous videos that accompany "e;Babe"e; and lead single "e;Bring It On"e;). It follows, then, that Cave's next release would embody his own funhouse-mirror view of life during wartime: Arriving just in time for Dubya's second term, 2004's double-album opus Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus deviously blurred the line between religious-fundamentalist fervor and bloodthirsty savagery.

Recorded live off the floor in Paris' historic Studio Ferber, the 17-song set is, to my ears, the Bad Seeds' most visceral, vibrant recording to date, thanks in great part to an omnipresent church choir that serves less as a vessel for spiritual uplift than a sneering critique of organized religion. (From the gate-crashing opener "e;Get Ready for Love"e;: "e;Praise Him till you forgot what you're praising Him for/ Then praise Him a little bit more."e;) The Bad Seeds' first recording without the corrupting influence of long-time guitar-scraper Blixa Bargeld, Abattoir Blues compensates for his dissonant edge with pure gospel punk muscle, while Lyre of Orpheus elevates Cave's balladeer guise to a grand, widescreen scale. But, in their own unique ways, both present a response to the looming threat of holy war: where Abattoir's "e;Hiding All Away"e; sadistically champions it as cause for celebration ("e;There is a war coming!"e;), Orpheus' mournful closer "e;Carry Me"e; and "e;O Children"e; constitute last-ditch pleas for salvation.  

Abattoir/Orpheus was going to be a hard act to follow and, judging by the lack of outtakes on offer here, one that drew the creative well dry at the time. But instead of trying to top it, Cave wisely stripped down, hijacking fellow Bad Seeds Sclavunous, Warren Ellis, and Martyn Casey for a barrage-rock regression-therapy session as Grinderman. The satellite band further mined Cave's growing obsession with American pop culture and was enthusiastically received by old and new Cave fans alike. But its ultimate purpose may have well been to serve as a sort-of Bad Seeds boot camp. Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! scraped away Grinderman's surface squall, but retained its streetwise, dick-swinging attitude (and porn-star 'taches). And true to its conflation of the sacred and the profane-- resurrecting the New Testament's Lazarus as a hustler in modern-day New York City-- Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is at once the Bad Seeds' most classic rockin' album to date (with "e;Today's Lesson"e; built upon the "e;Jenny says"e; template of the Velvets' "e;Rock & Roll"e;), and its most sonically adventurous, as heard in the eerily disembodied krautrock of "e;Night of the Lotus Eaters"e; (though, sadly, the bonus disc neglects to include the more menacing version the Bad Seeds used to open shows on their 2008 tour).

Cave turned 50 during Lazarus' recording, but the only hints of aging arise when he turns the pen on himself and his process: Just as the Abattoir Blues standout "e;There She Goes, My Beautiful World"e; rendered writer's block as an apocalyptic affliction, Lazarus' centerpiece, "e;We Call Upon the Author"e;, keys in on the existential crisis of the 21st century scribe, who's duty-bound to educate the oblivious "e;idiot constituency"e; and "e;myxomatoid kids"e; while struggling to measure up to the greats. ("e;Berryman was the best! He wrote like wet papier-mâché!"e;) It's a hilarious song-- and all the funnier because this admission of inadequacy came in the midst of an exceedingly productive and audacious streak in Cave's already storied long career.

But for all the manic glee he takes in fashioning a hook out of a line like "e;Prolix! Prolix!/ Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix,"e; the song reveals the seriousness and discipline that Cave-- the rare songwriter who keeps regular office hours-- continues to apply to his craft. In the years that have passed since Lazarus, Cave has both rebooted and retired Grinderman and tenured resignation papers from his longest serving Bad Seed, Mick Harvey. But given his recent track record of perseverence in the face of change, there's good reason to believe this author still has lots of explaining to do.

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The Books: A Dot in Time

2013-02-09 20:31:00 (читать в оригинале)

The Books met over Shooby Taylor. "e;It was pretty random,"e; co-founder Nick Zammuto told Pitchfork in an interview in 2003. "e;I met this girl Julie up in Williamstown, and we were both working the field of art conservation. She ended up getting a job with the Guggenheim and I followed her down to New York where she got this apartment with her sister. Her sister was friends with Paul [de Jong, cellist and co-founder], and so we ended up living in the same building together. I remember the first time I went over to his apartment. He pulled out this Shooby Taylor record."e;

Taylor was a musical oddity known for his energetic, one-of-a-kind scat singing. He was profiled in Irwin Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music. And the fact that his music was in the room when Zammuto first met cellist and fellow sound collector Paul de Jong makes perfect sense. Taylor's music was something that was lost, found, re-discovered, and shared. It was weird and it had an uncertain context and the people who passed those records around created new ones. Such odd gems are rescued from obscurity and passed around by people like de Jong and Zammuto. And that drive provided the initial inspiration for the Books.

That was the beginning of the last decade, and now the Books are no more. After four albums, an EP, stray tracks, and some videos, the Books called it quits this year. Nick Zammuto was somewhat evasive as to why, but it doesn't really matter. It feels right for the Books to wind things up. They had a brilliant idea, they created a sound around it, they bent and shaped and explored that sound as best they could. And then eventually it came time to put that sound away. You couldn't ask for a better send-off than A Dot in Time, a lovingly compiled and gorgeous box set that collects all of their released music on vinyl and mp3 along with a DVD of their videos.

The Books had a distinctive sound that was like nothing else when it arrived on the scene in 2002. It sounded so bizarre and alluring in part because it was the perfect music for a very specific time and place. If it'd have arrived five years later, it wouldn't have made nearly as much sense. In 2002, Google was firmly in control of the web search game, but information in general still seemed overwhelming, random, unknowable. There were fewer ways to focus attention on a single nugget of culture. And the Books were founded in part as a way to take a stream of artifacts and re-assemble them into something new. Which is another way of saying that the Books made less sense in the post-YouTube world; once everyone became an archivist and the fragments of culture were available to all, someone coming to the Books for the first time did so without the same sense of wonder.

But all that was a few years away. First, we had Thought for Food, one of the most startling and original debut albums of the 00s. With this project, you didn't know where one element started and another began. What was sampled? What was played? Where did these sounds come from? Was the young child being told, "e;You have no mother and father,"e; and being asked not to touch his father in the song "e;Motherless Bastard"e; "e;real"e; or was this from a movie or was it staged? It was hard to know, and this lingering sense of strangeness and unknowability suited the music perfectly. Without access to the details of authorship, you could only let the sound wash over you, and it was a beauty. Subtle guitar and banjo, bits of cello, some voices. We were just coming out of the peak era of Chicago post-rock, and the Books' approach to sound bore some relationship to the thoughtful, understated, cerebral, but still deeply felt expression of Jim O'Rourke, one of the lynchpins of that scene. A decade on, Thought for Food still works its peculiar magic.

The Lemon of Pink is that odd follow-up album that finds a band refining and honing its sound but losing the element of surprise. The technique is almost identical, but Zammuto and de Jong had a better understanding of how to wield their instruments and samples for maximum impact. As is sometimes the case, for the Books, each of their first three albums has an almost equal number of fans who think it's the best. And in these cases, a lot depends on which you heard first. The Lemon of Pink showed them growing slowly into the more song-oriented direction they would develop later, but the samples are as fresh as ever, words and syllables plucked from who-knows-where and allowed to settle in your brain and grow into a new kind of meaning.

Lost and Safe was the breakthrough, the album that moved the Books out of the realm of small cult act. They'd become an enjoyable live band, and they found a sort of community in the world of bookish coffee shops and NPR. Many fans like Lost and Safe best, and in retrospect I feel I underrated it upon its initial release. It was one of those cases in which what I wanted from the band was different from what they were interested in doing. The Books were heading further in the direction of proper songs. Since Zammuto's voice is limited, his muted sing-speak-whisper integrated very well into the clips from instructional records and ancient news broadcasts. Coming as it did after the 2004 presidential elections, a difficult time for progressives in the United States, Lost and Safe had a political undercurrent that further bound the Books to this community. "e;I can feel a collective rumbling in America,"e; went a line in "e;Be Good to Them Always"e;, the album highlight and arguably the greatest single track the Books ever made. It's a song that contained so much: surface beauty, intricate construction, subtle commentary. And if the album as a whole didn't quite deliver on that promise, it was the third winner in a row from a group that didn't necessarily seem like they could sustain things that long.

Between Lost and Safe and their final album, 2010's The Way Out, the books released a collection of scraps called Music for a French Elevator. That EP has been greatly expanded with 32 additional tracks, and the set as a whole is unexpectedly satisfying and offers a different angle on the Books' world. Without the careful editing and thematic unity of their albums, French Elevator mostly shows how musical they were, and how adept they were at making simple guitar and cello patterns pack an emotional punch. Some of these extra tracks are just instrumentals played by Zammuto and de Jong and some are just samples, but they do illustrate the consistency of their aesthetic, how they were able to shape different textures so that they fit with with their overriding sound.

And then came The Way Out, a more playful and free-wheeling album. In retrospect, The Way Out is easily the least satisfying of the four, though it still has its charms. Experimenting with steadier beats and grooves while going heavier on the jokes, The Way Out ultimately feels like a dry run for Zammuto's solo work than a wrap-up to the Books proper. But heard here, in the context of their career as a whole, it's as good an epitaph as any. Something feels right about this box set, from the beautiful design to the fact that it feels a bit like a tombstone. As markers of the dead go, it's a beautiful one. May it live and decay and be covered with weeds and, eventually, be unearthed and dusted off by some young creative person still finding their way. And may that person pass it on to someone else and find a way to share something new with the world.

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Miles Davis: The Bootleg Series, Volume 2: Live in Europe 1969

2013-02-09 20:30:00 (читать в оригинале)

"e;It was really a bad motherfucker,"e; Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography of the live band he led in 1969. With somewhat less panache, Davis completists have pegged the group the Lost Quintet, since, unlike the two longstanding Davis five-pieces that preceded it, this one never made a proper studio recording. All of the members-- saxophonist Wayne Shorter, keyboardist Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette-- appear on 1970's landmark Bitches Brew and other scattered sessions from the time, but only as part of larger ensembles; until now, if you wanted to hear them as a stripped-down unit, you had to consult imports, bootlegs and YouTube. This second installment in the Miles Davis Bootleg Series, which follows an excellent 2011 set focusing on the trumpeter's prior working band, gives us three complete Lost Quintet gigs, plus the majority of a fourth, on three CDs and one DVD. 

It's a real trove, and not just because this lineup is relatively obscure. In a very clear way, the Lost Quintet is the pivot point between the two main phases of Miles' 40-plus-year career: the acoustic jazz idiom he inhabited, and eventually revolutionized, from the mid-'40s through the late '60s, and the plugged-in ensembles he would lead until his death in 1991. In other words, if you've ever wondered exactly how the dapper jazzman of Kind of Blue morphed into a loudly attired icon in wraparound shades, this set offers some crucial clues. When we last left Miles, on The Bootleg Series, Volume 1, he was leading the world's most advanced and telepathic acoustic jazz group (the so-called Second Great Quintet); by the time of the gigs on Live in Europe 1969, Miles was straddling the fault line. He had already traded acoustic piano for overdriven electric keys and had begun taking rhythmic and textural cues from contemporary funk, but he hadn't yet entered his psychedelic-groove-machine phase in earnest. (For an early taste of the latter, try the 2001 Miles archival release Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970): It's About that Time, which features Shorter, Corea, Holland-- who had switched to electric bass in the interim-- and DeJohnette, as well as percussionist Airto Moreira.) Unlike the groups that succeeded it, the Lost Quintet shared a significant portion of its DNA with the acoustic, jazz-centric Miles ensembles that came before.

This is especially apparent on the first two sets here: good-sounding, often-bootlegged performances recorded over successive July nights at the 1969 Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival in Antibes, France. The scope of these concerts is remarkable. You hear pieces from the yet-unrecorded Bitches Brew ("e;Spanish Key,"e; "e;Miles Runs the Voodoo Down"e;); a track from the ethereal masterpiece In a Silent Way ("e;It's About That Time"e;), recorded that past February but not yet released; staples of the Second Great Quintet repertoire (including "e;Masqualero"e; and "e;Footprints,"e; both by Shorter, the sole holdover from that band); and themes Miles had favored since the late 50s ("e;Milestones,"e; "e;Round Midnight"e;)-- all flowing together in the expertly paced suites that were Miles' onstage trademark. But the repertoire is only half of the story; as always with Miles groups, the personnel is the thing. Like the members of the Second Great Quintet, these musicians, aside from the relatively unknown Holland, were already rising or established stars when Miles recruited them. They make for a deadly team, equally at home with low-down groove, in-the-pocket swing and feverish abstraction. 

The group displays its raucous intensity right from the start of the first Antibes set. During opener "e;Directions,"e; Corea, Holland and DeJohnette send some serious whitewater their boss's way, in the form of a near-chaotic proto-breakbeat. Miles responds with a brief but explosive solo, full of blaring peaks and bravura runs. If drummer Tony Williams was the chief upsetter in the Second Great Quintet-- furnishing near-constant turbulence to the delight of his employer-- the entire rhythm section takes on that role in the Lost Quintet. When Davis isn't playing, they get straight-up Dionysian. The night-two version of "e;Miles Runs the Voodoo Down"e; starts off as crackling uptempo funk. But following Shorter's solo, Corea and Holland engage in a free-form duel between bleepy keyboard and scratchy bowed bass that rivals Sun Ra's freakiest excursions. Here you can hear Corea-- who has gone on record saying he distrusted the electric piano when Miles first suggested he play it-- forgetting about technique and reveling in an alien sound palette.

The band isn't just about disruption. The versions of familiar pieces like "e;Footprints"e; and "e;Round Midnight,"e; both from from the first Antibes set, feature bashing DeJohnette crescendos and bracingly gritty Shorter solos, but they also demonstrate the band's knack for extraordinarily supple, dynamically controlled swing. A brief Miles/Corea duet on "e;I Fall in Love Too Easily,"e; from night two, is another shrewd pace-changer. On The Bootleg Series, Volume 1, Miles and Herbie Hancock introduce this same piece as an unaccompanied duo, but here, Corea's electric piano lends it a newly dreamlike aura. In retrospect, this interlude plays like a stealthy sneak preview of In a Silent Way's proto-ambient brain massage; like the versions of Shorter's "e;Sanctuary"e; that close each Antibes set, it's part jazz balladry, part immersive soundscape.

The material on disc three, portions of two sets from November 5 in Stockholm, contrasts nicely with the fierce, sprawling Antibes shows. Because of an electric-piano malfunction, Corea plays acoustic piano for most of the first set, a swap that has a major effect on the group dynamic. This performance has its dark, unruly moments, including an early take on the ominous title track of Bitches Brew, recorded that past August but not yet released, but overall, it's a surprisingly tame outing. The version of Shorter's "e;Nefertiti"e; sounds both elegant and almost quaint, about as close as the Lost Quintet ever came to jazz orthodoxy. The one sample we get of the second Stockholm set offers a tantalizing contrast: a rare take on "e;This"e;, a Corea composition which the pianist had first recorded in May of '69 with a band that included both Holland and DeJohnette. After a brief group theme statement-- with Corea back on electric piano-- the ensemble embarks on a series of atomized improvisations, including a dense Davis/DeJohnette face-off and a pointillist Shorter/Holland/DeJohnette excursion. This single track, possibly the most concentrated example on record of a Miles Davis group playing free jazz, demonstrates how the members of the Lost Quintet spurred the leader toward the avant-garde even as they helped him achieve a deeper engagement with funk and psychedelia. 

The DVD, containing a complete Berlin concert from November 7, is essential; the clarity and intimacy of this pristine multicamera document should assure that no one ever again pegs this band as obscure. The in-progress shift in Miles' aesthetic, already apparent in the music, is right there to behold in the men's dress: Whereas the Second Great Quintet always turned up in black tie, the Lost Quintet looks like it's fresh from a Williamsburg vintage shop. (Holland's ensemble—a cow-skin-pattern vest over a purple sweatsuit—is either a facepalmer or a triumph, depending on your tastes.) The band takes a while to warm up here, turning in an unusually subdued "e;Directions."e; But by a mid-set "e;It's About That Time,"e; the feral magic is back; Shorter's brilliantly jittery, speaking-in-tongues soprano solo and a low-volume, high-intensity free-improv duet between Corea and a mallets-wielding DeJohnette make this piece one of the highlights of the entire box set.

Shorter, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette eventually left Miles' band in turn, and Davis began constructing the psych-funk juggernaut heard on records like 1974's aptly titled Dark Magus. As Miles outfitted his trumpet with a wah-wah effect, enlisted a phalanx of guitars and began doubling on organ, the atmosphere thickened and the grooves grew more colossal, but the trumpeter would never again lead a group as thrillingly virtuosic and diabolically mutable as the Lost Quintet. (It's a testament to Miles' eye for talent that Shorter, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette still rank among the most popular and esteemed jazz musicians on earth; Shorter's current working quartet, heard on the new Blue Note release Without a Net, exemplifies a volatility that's directly traceable to the Lost Quintet.) That fact is now duly noted in the official record, thanks to this set-- a bad motherfucker in its own right.

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Marianne Faithfull: Broken English: Deluxe Edition

2013-02-09 20:30:00 (читать в оригинале)

Like a lot of stories of scandal, ruin, and the opportunity for redemption, it started with a pretty face. In the spring of 1964, 17-year old Marianne Faithfull walked into a swinging, star-studded London party and landed a record deal without singing a note; Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones manager and world-class sleazeball, famously summed up the matter with his usual showbiz aplomb: "e;I saw an angel with big tits and signed her."e; Within the year, the bookish baroness' daughter was climbing the charts and making the rounds at concert halls and the BBC, thrust into a pop career she didn't much want in the first place. ("e;For one brief, blissful moment I thought I saw a way out of my pop nightmare,"e; she wrote three decades later in her autobiography, Faithfull, which is every bit as insightful, vivid, and deliciously bonkers as Keith Richards' Life.) Faithfull was a passable vocalist with a folksy, melancholy, relatively generic lilt, but there was a certain vacancy and listlessness about her that suggested she'd not yet become comfortable in her skin. If you watch some of her earliest performances on YouTube, she has a way of making Lana Del Rey look present.

Faithfull started dating Mick Jagger in 1966, and her 60s output is generally only discussed in terms of how it relates to that of the Stones: "e;As Tears Go By"e; is more famous for being the first song Mick and Keith wrote together than for being Faithfull's debut single. On the personal front, though, the opposite was true: Notoriety had a way of sliding off the boys and sticking to Faithfull. After the infamous Redlands drug bust, the press dubbed her "e;Miss X"e; and, a bit more personably, "e;The Girl in the Fur Rug."e; ("e;SCANTILY CLAD WOMAN AT DRUG PARTY"e; screamed one representative headline.) To those closer to the Stones' circle, she was The Muse-- though by her account, her relationship with Jagger was a pretty mutual exchange of ideas, old records, and hallucinogens. Ever the avid reader, a little while prior to the Beggar's Banquet sessions, Faithfull handed him The Master and Margarita and suggested that this Lucifer guy might make for a good character in a song. She wrote the lyrics to "e;Sister Morphine"e;, and cut a shudderingly melancholy version that makes the Stones' take almost seem like a romp. This was maybe the first big, public hint that Miss X knew more about pain and suffering than a lot of people wanted to assume. When she slipped into the coma that almost killed her-- the result of taking 150 Tuinals in a hotel room in Australia-- she had a vision that Brian Jones, just six days in the ground, was beckoning her over a cliff. He leapt; at the last minute she decided to stay. When she opened her eyes in a hospital room six days later, Mick said, "e;Marianne, we thought we'd lost you."e; In that milky voice that was already starting to curdle, the first thing she said to him was, "e;Wild horses couldn't drag me away."e;

That's the thing about pretty faces. We'd much prefer to watch them wilt. We don't expect them to belong to the fighters-- the junkies and monks and cockroaches who'll survive every atomic bomb and suicide attempt and outlive us all. And we definitely don't expect them to make songs as gnarled and candid as the ones on Faithfull's finest record, Broken English, but there you go: the best records are all, in some way or another, the ones that blow a mouthful of smoke in the face of expectation. The world that thought it had tsk-tsked Miss X into submission was probably not ready for Broken English in 1979, and even today as it's released in a deluxe edition, it's still raw enough to make you squirm-- the cracked, undead voice of a woman back from exile to make a record about the simple audacity of staying alive.

If you know one thing about Broken English, you probably know that Faithfull was living on the streets right before she made it. And unlike the Mars Bar myth (now thoroughly debunked by Faithfull, Keith Richards, and an honest-to-goodness policeman), this checks out. Broke, heroin-dependent, and (it seemed) professionally washed up, Faithfull spent the better part of two years living in a roofless pile of rubble in Soho, a bombed-out ruin of the Blitz. She was squatting with her then-husband Ben Brierley (of British punks the Vibrators) and riding the unexpected success of her forlorn ballad, "e;Dreamin' My Dreams"e; (a dud at home but a surprise hit in politically tumultuous Ireland, where, in 1976, "e;forlorn"e; was the mood of the hour) when somebody at her label rather improbably gave her the money to cut another record.

The resulting album feels so intimate and personal that it's easy to overstate its singularity. But Broken English is more than just a portrait of the addict as a middle-aged woman; it captures an entire generation's disillusioned comedown. "e;The days of mind-opening drugs were over,"e; Faithfull writes in her autobiography, reflecting on the spiritual climate of the mid-70s. "e;The world had tilted. A major change in key had taken place. It was a Mahler symphony whirling madly out of control."e; And that's the key in which these songs were written and recorded. Much in the way the Stones did in the late 60s, Broken English taps into a collective consciousness. The new-wave-tinged title track evokes the anxious, prickling paranoia of the Cold War, a chillingly grim cover of "e;Working Class Hero"e; longs for the counterculture's idealistic faith in individuality, and the excellent "e;Brain Drain"e; ("e;Got so much to offer/ But I can't pay the rent/ I can't buy you roses 'cause the money's all spent"e;) captures the hopelessness of the junkie's lifestyle. A rapidly deteriorating Tim Hardin co-wrote the lyrics on that last one with Faithfull and Brierley on a debauched trip to Antigua. Both implicitly and explicitly, it's a ballad of wasted genius. It's one of the last songs to bear Hardin's name-- he was dead of an overdose a little over a year after the record came out.

After dabbling in baroque pop and country, Faithfull drew fresh inspiration from the Sex Pistols and Brierley's clan in the late 70s, but Broken English is a punk record more in spirit than in sound. (It doesn't sound much like any of her subsequent records either; afterwards, she moved towards the Weill-meets-Tom-Waits-in-a-dank-cabaret sound of the excellent Strange Weather.) Stylistically, Broken English is a fusion of new wave, blues, reggae, and pop, created by a backing band talented enough to genre-hop deftly. Guitarist Barry Reynolds adds a particularly distinct flair to the record; on the incendiary "e;Why  D'ya Do It"e;, his barbed, sneering riff is the perfect match for Faithfull's legendary performance. Easily one of the best songs in her repertoire, "e;Why  D'ya Do It"e; is also probably the most controversial-- a Heathcote Williams-penned, unfiltered torrent of lovers' rage scattered liberally but purposefully with a few words that still have the power to shock.

Broken English's most affecting moment is Faithfull's spellbinding rendition of Shel Silverstein's "e;The Ballad of Lucy Jordan"e;, a song about a bored housewife dreaming of the exhilarating life and "e;thousand lovers"e; she never had, slowly going mad. Obviously, it's far from autobiography, but when you know Faithfull's history (a veritable primer on the pitfalls of an exhilarating life), the subtext becomes almost unbearably poignant. "e;Lucy Jordan is me if my life had take a different turn,"e; she has said. "e;It's a song of identification with women who are trapped in that life and the true private horror of the 'good life.'"e; But the pain in her fractured voice tells a more complicated story, pointing towards the classic catch-22 that still plagues famous and unfamous women alike: The world will size you up and make you choose one of two roles, Miss X or Lucy Jordan. And the worst of it, Faithfull is saying in this evocative performance, is that the dreamy conjectures about what your life would have been had you chosen differently will not only prove incessant, they might actually drive you crazy.

The bonus material on this deluxe edition of Broken English doesn't add too much to the experience. With only one exception ("e;Sister Morphine"e;), the extra disc is all alternate mixes and extended cuts of the songs that made the record. If anything, the remixes' noodly accoutrements will make you appreciate the record's purposeful minimalism anew. In almost every case, wisely, producer Mark Miller Mundy and engineer Bob Potter let the unvarnished power of Faithfull's voice carry these songs. The deluxe edition also includes the great experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman's early music videos for "e;Broken English"e;, "e;Witches Song"e;, and "e;Lucy Jordan"e;, but if you can make peace with the low quality you could have watched these on YouTube years ago. This particular re-release of Broken English isn't notable because of any new insight it brings to the listening experience, but for the simple fact that it might bring some new fans to an enduringly great record.

Faithfull has been clean for a while now, but she still speaks freely and unapologetically about the experiences that lead her to making this record. Last week I was listening to an interview with her that I assumed was current, done in promotion of the deluxe edition. I didn't realize it was a few years old until she started talking about Amy Winehouse hopefully and in the present tense. "e;She's young, she's rich, she feels absolutely immortal,"e; Faithfull said, with obvious empathy. "e;They judge her [harshly]... but she's going to get through it all, I know it."e; Feeling a little haunted after hearing this, I put on Broken English immediately, and its sheer power and purpose had never felt more obvious. This record documents a particular shade of darkness not everybody lives to describe. Like Faithfull identifying with her opposite in Lucy Jordan, Broken English is an almost otherworldly communion with the other side; it's a record for the Joneses and the Hardins and the Winehouses and all the other voices that the wild horses dragged away before they could say anything this honest about their pain. Aching and defiantly alive, it still bleeds like it was cut yesterday.