REVIEWS:
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(reviewed by Jason L. Corner)
HIGH POINTS: The Queen and the Soldier (everything else is good but nothing really compares). LOW POINTS: None
This is a badly neglected record. But it's not hard to see why, at first glance. It's a very unassuming album. The instrumentation is modest - although many players are listed, there aren't any monumental solos or striking atmospheric effects. The songs pretty much don't seem to be about anything special or important. And Suzanne's singing voice seems, at first, rather unspectacular, and relies a great deal on speaking rhythms rather than singing rhythms. (In fact, the first song consists almost entirely of spoken delivery.)
And yet, if you give this album the right kind of chance, all these weaknesses will turn into strengths. The key to getting inside the album first, though, is paying attention to the lyrics. Not only is Suzanne Vega the best singer-songwriter of the 1980s, as a lyricist she can easily stand the company of Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Joni Mitchell, or Roger Waters.
Take the second song, "Small Blue Thing." The first lines - "Today I am/A small blue thing/Like a marble/Or an eye" - should tell you that you're dealing with something that's at least unique. Suzanne never lets on to what that small blue thing is, and it's not a riddle. Instead, we're taken through the experience of being something a little bit indefinable, somehow between being a thing and being an abstract quality, described in language that's matter-of-fact about such weird, ethereal subject matter. The world of Suzanne's lyrics is like that. Things are always slipping in and out, and nothing's quite definable, but everything is pictured clearly.
And once you get into this lyrical vibe, then everything else about the album becomes a point in its favor. The deliberately sparse arrangements are just part of the wispy mood of the record: take "Straight Lines" or "Knight Moves," for example, which open with brief, stacatto-y guitar parts underneath Suzanne's vocals, or the faraway voice-and-guitar of "Cracking." The ambiguity of the lyrical subjects becomes part of the charm - who is Marlene, and how does she watch from the wall? And Suzanne's vocals, with their alternation between real singing and half-singing-half-talking create a powerful sense of intimacy.
Everything I've said so far, though, kind of falls away when you get to "The Queen and the Soldier." There's no elusive symbolism here; the language of the first line tells you that you're going to get a straight-up narrative: "The soldier came knocking upon the queen's door." The backing is six-string and twelve-string, playing a minor arpeggio. The story is of a soldier who comes to the queen and tells her that he won't fight in her wars anymore, and urges the queen to come away and live the simple life with him. She sends him outside (of her castle, I guess) to wait for her, and then has him killed. Now, all this could have been a very melodramatic story of a good, independent thinker brought down by the system. Yay to peace and boo to power. What makes this a great song (lyrically) is not its material - any material can make a good or a bad piece of work; Walt Whitman wrote a beautiful poem about manure - but its treatment. The point of view is largely the queen's, and it explores how the abuse of power stems from a fear of life. ("And the sun it was cold, and the sky it was gray/And she wanted more than she ever could say/But she knew how it frightened her, and she turned away/And would not look at his face again.") Because the queen stays in her tower, and the war continues, the story is essentially a tragedy ("While the queen went on strangling in the solitude she preferred/The battle continued on"). But it's mitigated by soldier's small triumph, which was not defiance - it's not that he disobeyed orders - but compassion, his sincere attempt to touch her humanity. There's no attempt to tie this to any larger political issue - it's essentially a psychological story.
The musical treatment is perfectly right. Some songs demand interplay between vocals and music to tell the story: Peter Gabriel-era Genesis is the best example of this (it's hard to imagine "Musical Box" meaning the same thing without Steve Hackett's epic guitar breaks). But sometimes what you need is a subtle - though not simple - background so the lyrics can deliver. (The best works of Bob Dylan deliver this.) The simple, sad arpeggios on six-string and twelve-string guitar are just the right mood-setters, and when they become stacatto and almost percussive at the end (under the final verse: "Out in the distance her order was heard/And the soldier was killed, still waiting for her word/And while the queen went on strangling in the solitude she preferred/The battle continued on") and then go back to their arpeggios, it's a beautiful example of tension and release. There are two short little breaks, also, in the course of the song, one for a short phrase on piano, and the other for a full-blooded passage on organ, with Suzanne crying out on top. It's not exaggeration to say that this is one of my probably five to ten favorite songs ever (I'm thinking strictly in terms of songwriting with lyrics, not composition or instrumental performance). The rest of the album is understandably not as good, but even without this song, it's an excellent record. Just take the necessary time to get used to it.
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(reviewed by Jason L. Corner)
HIGH POINTS: Luka, Ironbound/Fancy Poultry, Solitude Standing, Gypsy. LOW POINTS: None
The mid- to late-eighties are much-maligned by web reviewers. There are good reasons, of course. The heyday of the innovators of the early eighties (the Police and the New Wave generally) was over, nobody in particular seemed to be stepping up to replace them, and the major artists of the sixties and seventies had mostly sunk into a stupor. (The Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull - heck, even Joni Mitchell cheesed out some. Even Miles cheesed out some.) I think this malaise has been overrated (there was plenty of good metal, of both the hair and power variety, and lots of the old hands were still putting out creative music - Sting, anyone? King Crimson?), but now's not the time to discuss that; merely to say that one of the bright spots was Suzanne Vega and her second album, Solitude Standing, the best album of 1987.
Most of the songs were written at the same time as the songs on the first album, so many of the comments still apply. What's improved is the musical vibe. Suzanne has gotten more comfortable playing with a band, and they take more of a role in defining how the songs sound. There are still lots of subtle, understated touches, but also some big gestures. For one thing, some of the songs have a real-life rock groove, like "In the Eye," "Luka," and the title track. I don't mean generic grooves, either, but grooves adjusted and adapted to the particular songs. "Luka," for example, has bright guitar riffing and a strummed solo over a simple, uptempo beat, which makes for a nice ironic contrast suited to the lyrics (more about those later). The title track, on the other hand, is intense, slow, heavy, and moody.
There are also plenty of songs in the acoustic vein, like "Language" and "Night Vision," and the album's best song, the romantic ballad "Gypsy." Maybe its corny of me to like this tune so much; there's just something charming in its simplicity, and, like many a great folk song, it's got a twinge of bittersweetness to it ("And you'll blow away forever soon/And go on to distant lands") that keeps it from becoming sappy. And there are tunes that use unconventional approaches, like the resounding tom-toms of "Wooden Horse (Caspar Hauser's Song)," or the big, moody swells on "Calypso."
The lyrics are pretty much in the same vein as those on the first album, but that doesn't detract - it was a rich vein. Mostly they present evocative symbols in very simple, precise language that implies a lot more than it says. "Calypso" and "Wooden Horse" both draw on Greek mythology and "Solitude Standing" creates its own mythology with its vision of solitude personified as a forbidding but alluring maiden standing in the doorway. Two tunes deserve special mention for their lyrics. "Luka" is a song about domestic violence, but there's no handholding or urging you to be moved; rather, the song is narrated in the simple phrases of a child who accepts the situation as the way things are, which ultimately I find more affecting: you, as the listener, have to have the emotion yourself without seeing it in the song. More enigmatic is "Ironbound/Fancy Poultry," where urban slice-of-life imagery suddenly gives way to repeated incantation "Fancy poultry parts sold here/Breasts and thighs and hearts/Backs are cheap and/Wings are nearly." This is repeated until finally Suzanne breaks out with "Wings are nearly/Free," her voice holding the note and the music breaking out of its tension into a crescendo. What does it mean? The presentation of the body as a dissected set of items for sale, "free" acquiring an ambiguous double meaning, especially in its proximity to "wings" - well, I don't know what it means per se, but it certainly evokes a lot. Certainly this album is the high point of Suzanne Vega's career (which means, sadly, that it's all downhill from here).
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