Sic Semper Tyrannis

Belew Prints: The Acoustic Adrian Belew Vol. 2 by Adrian Belew (1998)

Well, thank the Lord our office is pretty much back to normal. This probably isn’t a trade secret, but we did 8 ½ months’ worth of Heart Center scheduling in 11 days. For someone like me, who doesn’t particularly enjoy talking to people in the first place, that’s a situation known by the name of hell. I’ve been here 6 years now and that’s the busiest two weeks I can remember.

Enough about work. I’m boring even myself.

So, now for something I haven’t done in a long time…
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A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Library
Belew Prints: The Acoustic Adrian Belew Vol.2 by Adrian Belew(1998)

My Excel Randomizer spit out album #49 today, which happens to be an Adrian Belew album, which is quite appropriate, as his music has been on my mind quite a bit as of late.

So, what we have here is a fabulous introduction to the pop-ish side of Belew’s music. These are mostly acoustic treatments of previously-released material with the inclusion of a couple musique concrete pieces- “Things You Hit With a Stick” and “Return of the Chicken,” that he layers on top of each other to create a third piece called “Nude Wrestling with a Christmas Tree.”

Anyway, the stripped-down arrangements serve up Adrian’s distinctive, strangely beautiful voice and super-catchy melodies on a silver platter. A couple things about this album appeal to the musician in me: 1) I think he plays every instrument on here- bass, piano, percussion, drums, guitar, squawking chicken…2) The liner notes detail the ironically complicated steps to recording these “stripped-down” arrangements.” What sounds like a guy and a guitar is, a lot of times, multiple acoustic guitar parts. This is a technique that I have attempted at home in my own recording experiments and I love listening to these organically lush sounds and trying to isolate individual parts. It’s not easy to do, though, and I know it’s really “music-geek-y.”

But even for less nerdy listeners than I, there are treasures contained herein. The bulk of the music is from Adrian’s period of output which is heavily Beatles-ish--meaning catchy, sunny melodies and conventional verse-bridge-chorus structures. (He has since gone to further “out-there” territory as of late, with some digital doo-daddery, heavier guitar at times, and more minimal, haiku-esque lyrical styles.)

I first experienced this album in my closing months as a woefully underpaid record-store clerk, and at the time it was a special-order-only type of title. I guess I can point to that time as when I really fell in love with Adrian’s solo music and I haven’t recovered yet.

P.S. I used to point to his live performance of John Lennon’s “Free As a Bird” on this album as evidence of his stilted piano playing. Turned out he was playing a piano voice on a guitar synth. What I perceived as rhythmic hesitation and poor technique was really just latency inherent in the technology of the time as well as the unusual chordal inversions that result when playing guitar chord shapes. It was forgivable. :-)

posted by Mike @ 3:13 PM