Madonna!?! Meat Loaf!?!?

The Listening Posts for Meat Loaf are done. Well done, I might add.
And Madonna is underway!
Like always, the can now be found here.
Go!

The Reflecting Pool - Adam Ant

The entire Reflecting Pool series is now up and viewable at my personal blog.
Like I said, for the time being, this place is being moved.
The downside to my blog is that I am having trouble making comments work. iWeb is not cooperative unless you are a MobileMe subscriber.
I know there are a lot of Ant fans out there so that's what made doing this Reflecting Pool so exciting.
All of his albums are there. Dirk, Kings, Prince, Friend, Strip, Vive, Manners & Wonderful. PLUS Persuasion! PLUS the remastered bonus tracks, PLUS the Redux, PLUS the album of B-Sides.

That's just a few links. Go to the "archive" button to find all the reviews.
I will eventually be moving all the Listening Posts and Reflecting Pools to that site.
The bad news is the comments ( and that there's no "earlier post" link) but the good news is that I can host songs for as long as I am able.
In some cases, especially the Ant stuff, for a limited time, you can get stuff that would be really difficult, like Persuasion, or "Who's a Goofy Bunny, Then?".
So, I ask that, if you enjoyed The Listening Posts that you come to my blog and enter it in you RSS reader of choice. (I like Google Reader. And my email client.

Hope to see you there soon. (There are some comments places, so leave one.

Ta!

Listening Post - Elvis Costello

The Elvis Costello series has begun and it can be found along with an Adam Ant Reflecting pool HERE.
Thanks for stopping by. Right now there are no comments but they will be coming soon, I hope.

The end is the beginning is the end Part 2

So, if you go to www.allenlulu.com and look up at the top right you will see a page called Listening Post. You can subscribe to that RSS feed however you like.
I've begun porting over the entire Kissening Post Series. And I will do the same for the Gary Numan as well as other. And that will be the place where the new Listening Posts will all be found.
Thanks.

The end is the beginning is the end

Hi.
I don't know if there's anybody out there. I don't get a lot of comments. I may only have two readers. I don't know.
But, that's not what I do the blog for anyway. Let's face it. We do it for the cash.
I've decided to be a little more proactive with my "brand". As an actor I've often shied away from self-promotion but I gotta face it, it comes with the job.
I've always had a website. www.allenlulu.com but I barely maintained it and, truthfully, barely even remembered that I had it.
I've redesigned it and decided to take it more seriously. If you go there you will see plenty of links. Twitter. Resumes. Demos. Stuff.
There's also a new feature. Podcasting. Yes. Beth and I finally took the podcast plunge. Since we decided to do IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) we thought it might be interesting to podcast about the experience, much in the same way that we blogged about Zoe's birth.
The first episode is up on the site under Podcast and it's also available on iTunes. You can subscribe and stuff and we think it might actually end up being pretty interesting.
There's also an area for blogging. And I've decided to move the blog there. I don't love blogger. It's annoying in many ways. And I really don't want to learn Wordpress. Or any others. I flirted with the idea of doing a Listening Post Only blog, porting all the reviews over and then printing them as a book.
Then I realized that what I love about the internet is the duality of it. It's ephemeral but lasts forever. That's just neat.
I don't have the ability to add comments to entries yet. I'll figure that out. But I never got many comments to begin with.
So, if you are an avid reader of Septenary, please come over to allenlulu.com and subscribe with whatever doo-hickey you use. I use Google Reader. Lots of people use RSS. I dunno how you do it. But I would love it if you came along for the ride.
Thanks.
See you over there.

Listening Post - Gary Numan -Pure

Gary Numan - Pure - 2000

Numan wasted little time building on the success of Exile. Okay, three years. But what a nice three years those must have been.
Numan excoriated many of his fans' beliefs on Exile, attacking God and had his biggest success in a while. So, after touring and rebuilding on that success he went back in the studio and came out with.....
A Nine Inch nails record.
Angry. Industrial. All of what we love about Trent and Marilyn and you know what? Why the fuck not? After all, Corgan, manson, Reznor all count Numan as a major major influence. If he's going to be relevant he might as well emulate and learn from those who learned from him. It would be stupid and mean to expect him to be as forward a thinking innovator as he was 30 years ago. I mean, come on, the guy practically invented electro-New Wave. Howzabout he just apply what those who learned from him to his own style and see what he can come up with?
"Rip" sounds like "Closer" part two. And, guess what? It was a hit. Yep. Gary was back on the (UK) charts with this NIN rip. But, as NIN rips go, it's pretty awesome.
There are no suprises on Pure and it's hard for me to fully recommend because it's pretty damned repetitive. I was listening to "Rip" and it seemed to go on FOREVER. After it was over I realized that I had two copies of the song on the iPod and it played them back to back and I never noticed that one song ended and other began.
That's not great. But, it's still progress, Pure is. From Sacrifice to Exile to this.
The album really gets going toward the end. "Listen to my Voice" is a lovely melody sung in that nasal Numan tone we loved so long ago.
"Prayer for the Unborn" and "Little In Vitro" are songs that deal in some way with what Gary and his wife, Gemma, were going through, with miscarriages and IVF as they attempted to have children. They have been successful. And so are the songs.
You won't be surprised by Pure. You might not even like it. You might think Numan is doing himself and us a disservice in his slavish adoration of Reznor and Manson.
I say it's pretty damned good. All things considered, suffering through the likes of Warriors and Machine + Soul to get here was well worth it.

Pure - Gary Numan

Grade B-
ASide: Pure, Rip
BlindSide: Listen to My Voice, Little In Vitro
DownSide:

Listening Post - Gary Numan -Exile

Gary Numan - Exile - 1997

Exile opens with the industrial return-of-Jesus-Christ song "Dominion Day". It's angry and ominous, almost confessional, bleak and harkens back to the previous album, Sacrifice, as a template for Gary's revitalized direction. In other words, the funk is dead, bring on the dire.
Once again Numan is in control of almost all the instruments, save a guitar here or keyboard there. This abject control, in addition to his singular theme, that God and the Devil operate on the same playing field (and questions what we think of each, namely God's "goodness"), succeeds in creating one of the darkest and most satisfying records of Gary's career, or at least of the previous 10 years.
The textures and rhythms on some of Exile could be interpreted as almost middle eastern. At least that's what I hear in the drum programming. An earthy, dusty, ethereal and sexual pounding. Again I am listening to the extended versions of all these tracks so each song is about 1/3 longer than the original release. I don't know if that matters. There's a hypnotic quality to all of Numan's late 90s material and it makes for a relatively easy but terrifying listen.
Numan excoriates himself in interviews about albums like Machine + Soul as well he should. He was pandering to what he thought would work for sales and the result was way below par.
This is him, on the other hand, talking about Exile:
""Exile" to me is one big horror story. Personally. I don't believe in God at all, but if I'm wrong and there is a God, what kind of god would it be who would give us the world we live in? It certainly cannot be a good deity. At best God would have to be cruel, selfish, and he would have to have a huge ego. "Thou shalt not worship any other gods before me." That is just one huge ego trip."
Certainly he is focused.
Exile is a drum-loop heavy record and you might even recognize the track "Dark" from various movie trailers of the decade as well as "Dark City" and some video games.
I like Exile in theory a little more than in practice but that's a paltry dismissal because I'm not a big fan of industrial rock. As that sort of stuff goes, it's very satisfying.
It also sounds like a good album to _____ to. After all, it's about God n' shit.
Right?

Exile - Gary Numan

Grade: B+
ASide: Dominion Day, Absolution
BlindSide: Dark, The Angel Wars
DownSide:

Listening Post - Gary Numan - Random & Random 2(Tribute)

Gary Numan - Random & Random 2 - 1997 & 1998

I've never covered "tribute" or cover albums before. In 1997 I was in a now defunct record store on la Cienega Blvd in LA. I don't even know how I ended up in a conversation with the girl working the floor. She was a hard looking, fatigue wearing lesbian (don't ask how I know that) who recommended this album to me. How she knew I would be interested in Gary Numan or anything Numan-esque is beyond me.
The record is hard to find and I had no idea that there was a sequel, the link to which I've included here.
Some of the stuff is terrific. Earl Brutus' version of "M.E." with it's Queen breakdown in the middle for one and An Pier's sweet "Are 'Friends' Electric?" for another. Some of it isn't. But it's worth grabbing if for the only reason that it makes Numan seem totally relevant again.
Many of the songs on the first volume repeat themselves, the classics like "Me! I disconnect from you" and "We are So Fragile" (The Jesus Jones version being one of my favorites.) and some are downright nearly unrecognizable from the original, like The Orb's 9 minute techno opus version of "Jo the Waiter".
Amanda Ghost's version of "Absolution" from that year's Exile is lovely followed by a crunchy and great second version of "We are So Fragile" by Bis.
Other versions like Dave Clarke's "Cars" is basically nothing more than a remix of the original. But Deadsy's version of "Replicas" builds on the paranoia of the original and mines it for some truly end-of-century persecution psychosis (Deadsy is Gregg Allman's son Elijah Blue's band)
Jimi Tenor's Merry Go Round Calliope of terror version of Down in the Park is inspired, it should be pointed out.


Random Two is a bunch of remixes. I hate remixes.

Random 2 - Gary Numan

Listening Post - Gary Numan - Sacrifice

Gary Numan - Sacrifice - 1994

This is not your father's Gary Numan Record. Forget all that you know or knew of the former Mr. Webb. The saxophoniness? Gone. The futuro-electro-funk? Swept away.
Gary's got inspiration and it's from God and that dark sludge we call the 90s.
What I am actually listening to is not the release that you can hear on Lala (see below). I've got the extended Numa release. Every song is longer and none of them suffer for it.
We haven't heard Gary's spoken word despair since, well, Are 'Friends' Electric? and here they are on "Deadliner" mining the same aural tapestry that Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor would be making popular just around the corner. Was Gary forward thinking (again?) or was he following the trend of the day? No matter. He's not interested in selling to the masses. Been there, done that. He's got bigger fish to fry. God, for one. From what I understand, Numan's atheism will take a much larger presence on fothcoming releases but here it's only touched on with songs like, "Pray" and "A Question of Faith". The nuclear winter industrial backdrop is really a perfect setting for Gary's paranoid vision and worldview.
The industrial rhythms and cold, depressed vitriol really drives this record. Sure, I can hear how Gary would have fucked these songs up a few years back with Saxophones and overly sexualized R&B backup singers, but without them to drag the proceedings into some weirdo gotta-get-on-the-radio belief system they stand starkly and remind me why Numan was so successful in the first place. His asperger's which rendered him open to interpretation as arrogant or diffident only serves by the music. In fact, I wonder if he could have made this record, or the Machine Trilogy or even New Anger without it. And when he tried to reach out and incorporate soul music to his repertoire he could only fail since connection is probably the hardest thing for him.
"This is not love, this is not even worth a point of view" Numan once sang on "I Die, You Die". He was right. Because what he was really singing about is that "Love" is really just perspective and if you can't connect, for whatever reason but especially if you aren't wired that way, then "love" truly is just a point of view.
Sad? No. Because that's perspective as well.
I'm just glad to have Gary Numan back.
There is actually a love song on this album. "You Walk in My Soul" was written for Gemma, who started off as a fan and later became his wife. It's as pretty as anything Numan's done; he does seem to have a knack for those sweeping electro-ballads, if it is a little rote.
Sacrifice is overblown, overdone and very self-conscious but for me it works on every level and is a connector back to the original Numan style and worldview and the very reason he is looked at as an innovator rather than a relic.
I notice that Gary plays all the instruments himself on Sacrifice (save a guitar or bass on a couple tracks) and I think that serves him well. Again, I'm not sure he's the best collaborator. When he's in total control (or working with drug addicts like Paul Gardiner) he's able to get to his core. And he can rock again, like on "Love and Napalm", he isn't afraid of it anymore. The marriage of machine/soul never worked. The marriage of metal/machine has always worked. It's a welcome rediscover, even if it does run out steam by the end.

Sacrifice - Gary Numan

Grade: B
ASide: Love & Napalm, You Walk in My Soul
BlindSide: Pray, Deadliner, Desire
DownSide:

Listening Post: Gary Numan - Machine + Soul

Gary Numan - Machine + Soul - 1992

Dammit, dammit, dammit.
I'm gonna listen to this all the way through because that's the task I have presented myself. But...well, let's just let Gary speak for the record:
"I convinced myself [that Machine and Soul] was all right, that it was a 'clever' mix of funk, pop, rock and electronics. I almost convinced myself that I liked it. Not long after it was released though, I had to admit, only to myself for a while, that it was not what I'd hoped. There was nothing wrong with it as such, it just doesn't have much of me on it - not playing-wise, but emotionally. It is the most 'non-Numan' Numan album I've ever made, for my style, sound and character are completely missing. Whatever people think about my music, it's always been very personal. So, at a time when I was experiencing extreme lows in my career and private life, the last thing I felt like making was a shiny, polished pop record. But that's what I'd done."

He went on: "Nothing was right...That music, those clothes, that haircut. Imagine falling off a ship in the ocean, knowing if you stop swimming you're finished. That's what I was doing then. I was trying not to die."

There ya have it. Rendered anonymous on his own record. By himself! It's your own fucking label, Gary Numan!
Crap.
Wanna be funk. Soulless soul music. What is this guy thinking?
But you haven't really experienced bad music until you've heard Gary Numan try to RAP on "Poison". Seriously.
And, you gotta believe me when I say, he does a cover of Prince's "U Got the Look". And it's bad.

And just look at that cover. Gary looks so...sad. Like he's trying to tell you not to buy this record. "Look, I'm trapped in here but you don't have to be. You can save your money. See all that negative space on this cover? That's what the inside of the record feels like. Save yourself. Buy a Nine Inch Nails record. Seriously. Those guys are good. I'm...I'm just gonna sit her and stare at my...ooh, shiny buttons!"

Gary just spent so much energy on trying to create a mutant hybrid of Machine music and soul music. (Hence the title) After so many years, here's hoping he got the hint and gave it up.

Machine And Soul - Gary Numan

Grade: D
ASide: Machine and Soul
BlindSide:
DownSide: Generator, The Skin Game, Poison, Emotion...let's face it. This record is bad.