#62 - Ray Price's "Night Life" (1962)

Beware of introductions (including this one).  Sure, they fill an organizational need, easing the reader into the reading.  But, they are also a framing device, gently herding the audience into the head space where the writer wants them, to see things in a certain light.  Ray Price's Night Life begins with an introduction and immediately my guard is up.  I don't mind a well-scripted skit or other relevant atmosphere-building, but a direct monologue?  That is suspicious.  Price tells us that the set of songs was selected to reflect the emotions of those who do much of their living after hours.  But do they?  Some, like "The Twenty-Fourth Hour," fit this mold.  Most of the others, however, are composed of the same, homogeneous heartbreak you'll find populating country songs around the clock.  In the introduction, he specifically mentions "happiness" as one of the feelings he'll explore, but save the bouncing bass-lines on songs like "The Wild Side of Life" and "Sittin' and Thinkin'" (the latter's title being a euphemism for the type of introspection one does overnight in the county lockup), I'm hard pressed to remember hearing any "happy" moments.  In fact, I'm hard pressed to remember any moments at all.  This is a well-produced, well-performed collection of fairly bland music (with the possible exception of the Willie Nelson-penned title track), but as far as Price's claim that it "reflects" any aspect of real life, ante- or post-meridian, I'm afraid I have to call "bullshit" on that.  I'm left with the impression that his introduction was a post-production patch job meant to help an ad hoc theme coalesce around these otherwise generic tunes.  Personally, I think it backfired.  Now the album seems to be more promise than payoff.  Grade: C

#58 - Billie Holiday's "Lady in Satin" (1958)

I am fascinated by the beauty of decay.  On four separate occasions I was privileged to visit a college professor of mine at her summer home in Belturbet, Ireland.  It is a country house on a working dairy farm with all the dust, dung, and cobwebs you could want in such a rustic setting.  Sometimes it feels like the earth is slowly reclaiming the whole structure as the trees and creeping vines seem as if they are playing a long game with an eye to devouring it.  But each year it presses on, an eventual ruin, in all its spectacular and decrepit glory.  When it comes to music, I have an epicurean taste for the various stages of Bob Dylan's vocals, as they, too, have lapsed into irredeemable disrepair.  Much of the music he has produced in the twilight of his career has a timeless quality that is well-complemented by his ancient-sounding rasp.  "Not Dark Yet," "High Water (for Charley Patton)," and "Nettie Moore" from three of his most recent studio albums are exemplary specimens all.  Sadly, with his most recent album, Together Through Life, those spooky vocal cords of his finally gave up the ghost.  Johnny Cash, too, experienced a late-period revival and managed to get much of his physical decline committed to tape throughout all those Rick Rubin-helmed LPs for the American Recordings imprint.  At their best, his performances on those albums are hypnotic.  In many cases it is the eerie, wizened sound of a man singing about death as if he's already met his own.  What makes Dylan and Cash successful, of course, is the perfect pairing of sound with subject.  Who can better bellow "We'll Meet Again" than the man for whom the afterlife is closer than that distant shore?  Now, the consummate singer can adapt any song to her style or adapt her style to any song.  In her prime, this was certainly the case with Billie Holiday.  On Lady in Satin, she is not in her prime.  Recorded about a year and a half before she died, much of her range is gone and there is an audible strain when she tries for the higher and lower notes.  Her voice does invest these torch songs with an emotional vulnerability that is fitting for many of the lyrics, but not all of them.  Again, it's all about how well you marry what you're singing with how you're singing it.  The trick with these lover's laments is to sound wounded, but not defeated.  Unfortunately, after being ransacked by decades of disease and drug abuse, Holiday was out of tricks.  Grade: C

#44 - Metallica's "Master of Puppets" (1986)

One of the body's cleverer mechanisms for dealing with the hubbub of the modern world is called sensory adaptation.  Simply put, if it wanted to, the mind could try to process all the stimuli with which it is confronted every moment - the light and shadows that bounce around a room, the micro-weather patterns of a house, the sound of the blood pulsing in one's ears, the various points of contact where clothes meet skin - but, quite likely, such a constant barrage would be excruciating.  Consequently, we adapt.  I think something similar happens once we become immersed in a particular style of music.  So inured do we become to certain elements that traits we might otherwise find grating if we were more aware of them tend to pass by relatively unnoticed.  Just as the novice may be expected to miss the nuance of a style to which he is new, so may a devotee cease to notice features the outsider might find odd.  Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America is a classic text primarily because, as a foreigner, he was able to perceive the United States of the 1830s with eyes unjaundiced by familiarity.  It was this same attitude I tried to adopt when I approached the critically-acclaimed Master of Puppets by the seminal heavy metal band Metallica.  So what did I hear that the native-born headbanger might have missed?  Themes so comically dark it was hard for me to take them seriously.  But, that's alright, because Metallica take themselves seriously enough for all involved.  And the lyrics - oh, the lyrics! - they positively luxuriate in pain, death, insanity and violence, as if they were indulging in a shiatsu massage spa treatment...in hell.  Not that I could focus on the words all that much as the vocals took a backseat to the cacophony enveloping them.  Good thing, too, because otherwise I might've had to endure a greater intimacy with James Hetfield's groan-inducing, faux-medieval, German-style syntax on lines like "never you betray," "in madness you dwell," "nothing could I say," and "with fear you run."  Read those out loud and it sounds like Yoda translating the diary of Vlad the Impaler.  Several of the songs, most notably "Battery" and "Damage, Inc." begin softly and melodically before descending into the band's brand of sludgy thrashmageddon.  Unfortunately, these are more fake-outs than they are forays into meaningful variety.  For a band that thrives on compositional innovation, it comes off a bit lazy going to that same well time and time again.  Still, this album reminds me of nothing more than it does classical music and that might be the proper context in which to view the band itself.  These are highly adept musicians writing mini-symphonies that feature shifting time signatures and complex transitions all played at break-neck speeds.  They are also stuck in arrested development, articulating puerile ideas and exuding an often amateurish theatricality.  But is it so strange for these disparate qualities to coexist?  If Amadeus is to be believed at all, Mozart was three parts genius, one part buffoon.  Such a summary might also be applied to Metallica, even if their ratio is somewhat closer to 1:1.  Grade: C