Adrian Belew’s new album Elevator, to quote the final song “Seventy Going on Seventeen,’ “knows no self-life.” This is Mona Lisa smile music.
Now Belew, like any of his gravity-bending guitar solos, has been all over the rock ‘n’ roll universe. He’s played with Frank Zappa, the Talking Heads, the (wonderful!) Bears and, of course, with King Crimson beginning in the Discipline era.
But this is his one-man show. And, as my friend Kilda Defnut often says, “Weird electric guitar noises are neither created nor destroyed, but are subjected to the random nature of the known universe as it spins on its 33/3 vinyl spindle axis.” Well, sure. And the Soft Machine’s “Feelin’ Reelin’ (and the occasional) Squeelin’’” is the guitar ethos here. But we Adrian Belew fans already know that!
Well, sure (again!), but Belew’s solo music does sound, at times, like Discipline-era King Crimson. Certainly, the first song “A13” chugs along with a persistent railway piano pulse, which is joined with a Robert Fripp-like guitar run. And there’s the ghost of the Beatles, circa Rubber Soul. Of course, Belew’s vocals envelop the melody. Then (and it’s a big then!) the big wacky electric guitar careens with wild steam-blown abandon.
There’s more: ‘A Car I Can Talk To” has a blues Stray Cats-vibe (and really clever lyric!), while Belew’s electric guitar dances on a wavy Brylcreem curl. The complex “Backwards and Upside Down” once more evokes King Crimson, with its David Byrne-styled vocal delivery and obtuse guitar with more “feelin’ reelin’” and a bit of “squeelin’” roller-coaster ride.
And (holy cow!) “Good Morning Sun” ups the tilt-a-whirl ticket price with a crazy dance rhythm, ritualistic percussion, a bit of a tin whistle, a Caribbean vibe, and a Wild Man of Borneo guitar “barbaric yawp” (thank you, Walt Whitman!). It’s pretty incredible pop-rock music that embraces the enthused words (from the before-mentioned Byrne), “Now we just eat nuts and berries” or perhaps, “I’m afraid God has no master plan.”
Ditto for the humpbacked and skewed “Taking My Shoes for a Walk” that cross-circuits the musical world as we know it and exists somewhere on the other side of a funhouse mirror. Alice and her Wonderland’s Mad Hatter could hum this tune. Ditto, ditto. “The Saturday Roar of the Lawn” sounds like a buzzed Big Dipper carnival ride as it courses through all those family-friendly Baskin-Robbins’ ice cream flavors (32 to be exact!), with a really tuneful piano pulse to boot! Perhaps, it’s an insightful bit of modern rock ‘n’ roll post punk commentary. Well, Ditto, ditto, ditto.
Then, “Attitude” is a tough bit of gorgeous rock (Thrak) thumping that sonically wraps itself around a wondrous elephant (talk) guitar yelp that “groons” like a truculent moan about all the stolen tusks in the world. Sometimes, rock music just has to do that sort of thing.
Amid the creative chaos, there exists the eye of a melodic hurricane. “The Power of the Natural World” is an acoustic ode to the complexity of existence. Sincere strings caress the tune, as it swirls into a diminished Eastern dance vibe. “You Can’t Lie to Yourself” (with dramatic strings!) is pure folk brilliance, in a very Paul McCartney sort of way. Big compliment, there. “Beauty” simmers with really nice, if not fairly obvious, even more Beatle Paul wisdom.
But “Back to Love” “feels, reels, and squeels” again, with more of the (always) unexpected Crimson Beat vibe that dances on a circus tightrope wire, and promises more “larks’ tongue” into even more weird “aspic” to the eternally eager cerebral rock music world. It’s just a lovely piece of prog/art-rock music.
The final song “Seventy Going on Seventeen” is brief, acoustic, bouncy and is a light-hearted perhaps necessary finale to (before-mentioned) gravity-bending Big Dipper ride that carves a groove with the “none of the above” profundity of a rock ‘n’ roll Mona Lisa’s oddly melodic and eternally quizzical pop-music puzzle smile.
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