Living Colour - Collideoscope
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Free Music Notes for Collideoscope
Free Music Review: Fine choice
Hit: 4 Stars
When I've seen them live last year making people crazy on the Warsaw's Old Market, I knew my love for them was no-lame. It was truly hard to wait for thier new release, but worth it. It not a brilliant album, it is not an absolute hit, but they're back and noone shall avoid them live!A good choice with smashing tune of "Flying"!!!
Free Music Review: A dark but necessary record
Hit: 4 Stars
I LOVE the lyrics to "In Your Name" Brilliant.. Corey delivers the brainy, heavy duty, tongue-in-cheek commentary. Cool production too.Free Music Review: Great Expectations Mashed Up
Hit: 3 Stars
Having come of age in the late 80's I was strongly attracted to hard rock music that stretched boundaries and explored radical new ground. As a result I was heavily bowled over by Living Colour and their two classic albums, Vivid and Time's Up. Strangely enough, my other main mindblower from that era, Jane's Addiction, also have only two classic albums and made a comeback this year (my sense of mysteries in history is thus piqued). But while the Jane's comeback is mostly a success, Living Colour's mostly isn't. I really hate to say it, but the band should have put more consideration into presenting this piece of work as an attempted return to the upper reaches of rock brilliance.The album starts very weakly with the joyless and non-dynamic "Song Without Sin" and "A ? Of When." Then we get the unsubtle "Operation Mind Control" which for some reason is recorded with absolutely atrocious sound quality. Since the rest of the album sounds acceptable sonically, the basement quality of this one song must be some artistic statement, but who knows what that would be. Meanwhile, the two cover songs here are disastrous. AC/DC's "Back in Black" sounds rather cool with Vernon Reid's extra-juiced guitar, though Corey Glover's screechy vocal interpretation (perhaps a failed Brian Johnson tribute) reduces the song to a joke. The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" is an attempt at atmospherics, but merely drifts sluggishly into sleepyland. About the only successful tracks on the whole album are "Nightmare City" and "Great Expectation" in which the band's sounds are haunting and insistent enough to match Glover's urban-horror lyrics, while "Flying" is a moving ballad with a poignant human look at 9/11.
Of course, Living Colour are still among the best pure musicians on Earth. Vernon Reid's continuing guitar god status is indisputable (see his fascinating 1996 solo album for a non-stop demonstration of genius). Doug Wimbish and Will Calhoun are the world's most relentless rhythm section, though here for some reason Calhoun adds a lot of unnecessary electronic accompaniment to himself, which merely clutters up already sludgy tracks like "In Your Name" and "Choices Mash Up." The main heartbreaker here is Corey Glover, who still has all of his technical chops, though he sounds disturbingly detached emotionally from these proceedings, and even bored and tired (strangely, he accidentally illustrates this situation in some of the lyrics for "Holy Roller"). In effect, this album is a half-hearted and directionless effort by four brilliant musicians who should have put more intense consideration into their comeback effort. [~doomsdayer520~]
Free Music Review: Back in black
Hit: 3 Stars
Five years after disbanding, Living Colour reappeared on the tour circuit (SXSW)in early 2001. With their 1988 debut, 'Vivid', for which they supported The Rolling Stones, alot of us considered Living Colour as a candidate to save Rock and Roll with their blending of various styles. But by the release of their last true studio record, 'Stain' (1993), the novelty of being the first true all-Black rock band had worn off and Living Colour had adopted a much harder edge. The hardness continues with this release 10 years later.As with their last record, this is a collection of 13 original tunes (one of them, "Sacred Ground", was released on the 1995 compilation, 'Pride') and two covers, which, for the most part, consists of hard rock with occassional appearances by soul and blues ("Holy Roller"), reggae ("Nightmare City"), and industrial ("Choices Mash Up").
There has been much ado about their cover of AC/DC's "Back in Black", although Living Colour's take on this AOR classic is not much different than the original. Rather, the irony lies in the context of Cory Glover's karaoke-live delivery of lines like "They got to catch me if they want me to hang."
The highlight of the record is the non-politically correct juxtaposition of "Flying" and "In Your Name". "Flying" is a pleasant poppy tune accompanied by a disturbing, narrative about a person jumping from the Twin Towers ("Fate has given me wings/Such a terrible, funny thing"). (It reminds me, in almost all respects, of Lenny Kravitz' "Don't Go and Put a Bullet in Your Head".) This track fades out with the sound like a 757 into the manic and edgy "In Your Name", a quite literal song about the contradition of the War on Terrorism, complete with apropo video game sounds.
Overall, I would not recommend the record for the casual fan, but it is a must for those of us who have been actively wondering what has happened to Living Colour over the last decade.
Free Music Review: Good but too emotionally draining
Hit: 3 Stars
I guess it was to be expected - Living Colour was a band with a social conscience even in good times, so naturally when we're faced with terrorism, war and recession they put out something positively dreary. Gone are the days when even biting social commentary could be fun (as in "Elvis is Dead", "Funny Vibe", "Glamour Boys", "Ignorance Is Bliss", etc.). The only really fun song on Collideoscope is the bopping cover of AC/DC's "Back in Black".That said, the material is very good, as is the performance. Living Colour is still doing what it does best, which is experiment, and follow its muse wheresoever it may lead, with no genre biases. I agree that the production is kind of raw, like an '80s garage band, but I think this is a good thing. It helps set off all the stylistic fusion and electronic experiments.
And it's true what some point out about the lyrics - on 3 of the songs ("In Your Name", "Choices Mash Up" and "Sacred Ground") they come across as very left-wing. The rest of the new songs are not particularly left or right but just thought-provoking, which makes me think the covers were thrown in just to give our brains and hearts a rest.
The album's best song ("Flying") is also its most disturbing, but it contains probably the best Vernon Reid solo on any Living Colour album, which more than makes up for his general scarcity of solos. "Nightmare City" is a kick-ass rocker but again not exactly party music. I guess "Holy Roller" tries to shed some light on the proceedings, but the song doesn't really have the umph that the rest of the album has (which makes me think that these days the band doesn't have its heart in music that isn't angry, or tragic, or at least bittersweet).
All in all, I am glad to have a new set from these guys, but I hope on the next album they are reunited with their sense of humor.