Jeff Martin - Exile And The Kingdom
2006

Rating - 6/C

I was a huge fan of Jeff Martin's erstwhile band, The Tea Party. Their first three albums (4, if you count the independant label debut) were among the most unusual and exciting things to come out in the 90s - a private genre composed of equal parts classic rock swagger, 80s new wave/goth romanticism and darkness, and eastern musical influences and instruments. Their 3rd major label album, Transmission added trendy electronic/industrial elements to this mix, but did so in a manner that conveyed musical growth and experimentation, even if some of the songwriting on the album was only passable. Since then, they rapidly fell off their pedestal, releasing perfectly amiable but stale albums that employed modern rock radio-friendly arrangements and hooks in a bid at replicating their first crossover hit, 'Heaven's Coming Down', and trotted out eastern touches and progressive flourishes in what increasingly seemed like sheepish sops to long-term fans.

Now The Tea Party have folded, victims of personality conflicts, and mainman Jeff Martin has a solo album out that he claimed would tap into the original Tea Party vibe, the vibe that made albums like Splendor Solis and The Edges Of Twilight so alluring and exciting.

He shouldn't have raised the bar so high.

Exile And The Kingdom plays a lot like a latter-day Tea Party album, only more acoustic and freed from the constituency-appeasing touches of the band's last few albums. Everything's just more stripped-down, largely acoustic and supposedly more intimate.

'Daystar' and 'Stay Inside Of Me' are trademark Jeff Martin romantic anthems (the later having a really egregious bit where Martin goes 'oh woo-woo-woo' in an uncharecteristic and cheesy falsetto), while 'The Kingdom' is the patented tortured-sensitive-soul schtick, only more ebullient and positive in tone, which isn't necessarily a plus. The gospelish backing chorus vocals give the song an excessive sheen and smoothness.'Black Snake Blues' tries to recultivate his earlier blues interests, but, while it isn't a '3 cent New Orleans blues song' as my friend Prem would probably put it, it comes across as rather studied and contrived, trying too hard. 'Lament' has some of the heaviness missing elsewhere, and is a decent enough song, if not especially fresh or memorable. The other heavyish song here, 'World Is Calling', supposedly a jibe at GW Bush is harder-edged, but it seems a trifle over-obvious. It's got some nice riffs though, the heaviest on the whole album. 'Good Times Song' is actually a bit of a breath of fresh air - a lively, folksy tune that is fairly different in tone from Martin's previous work, but it's also kinda minor. As is this whole album, really.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Jeff Martin hasn't forever betrayed himself with this album - it sticks close to the Tea Party blueprint, and the songwriting and performances here are all of a uniform level of healthy competence. But that's it- not only is there no fresh ground being charted, the lyrical content is positively stale when it's not cloyingly positive and the songs all sound like poor cousins of better, earlier material. It isn't self-derivative in the literal sense of ripping off past compositions, but it's nothing new or exciting, just music that must have occured to Martin very comfortably and easily. If you like The Tea Party, as I do, this will either be a pleasant but forgettable addition to your collection, or one more nail in the coffin. I leave the decision to you, and promise not to call you a fool either way. Really.

The Tea Party -'The Edges Of Twilight'
1995

Rating - 10/A

This is one of those absolutely perfect albums that most artists record only about once in their careers - which makes it even more amazing that The Tea Party did so at least twice - their major label debut, Splendor Solis, is similarly flawless, and almost did so again with their third album, Transmission which boldly took their sound into new territory. After that, they pulled back, perhaps alarmed at their own growth and fearful of burnout, perhaps in response to the normalising effect imposed by the collective conservatism of record labels and the larger buying public, and released a string of pleasant, mostly amiable but unadventurous albums before calling it quits last year (2006, if you need to ask). Tchah.

Having chronicled their sad decline, or rather plateau-ing out, I shall now proceed to heap accolades and encomiums on the album presently under consideration. First of all, of course, you want to know: what do they sound like? Well, it's basically brash, chest-thumping classic blues-rock, which was already rather quaint in the mid-90s, but the good lads of TTP had a couple of aces up their sleeve.

For starters, they also had a fetish for the east-meets-west flavour of Led Zep's Kashmir, and spent time learning about the special and exotic instuments and scales that actual eastern music of maily the mid-eastern variety uses instead of endlessly ripping off Kashmir itself. This translates into a variety of eastern motifs and ideas apart from the stacatto-riff thing and the snakecharmer thing, although both are on display here, too. It also means there's all kinds of exotic instruments being played here - 32, the official count goes.

Secondly, while main man Jeff Martin has more than a trace of the swaggering, cocky Jim Morrison/Robbie Plant type rock star persona (he even sounds like Jim Morrison, although he writes marginally more mature poetry, erm, lyrics), he's also picked up cues from the romanticism, despair and so on of various post-punk acts like Joy Division, The Cure and Echo & The Bunnymen, even if this isn't immediately evident.

Having said all that, the emotionally intense, romantic and mystical nature of the band's lyrics and sound (music matches lyric perfectly here) isn't everyone's cup of tea. It even seems a trifle overwrought at times to me, lately - a lighter touch at times, a trace of humour would be nice. But that isn't what TTP do, and if you're willing to accept that, you're in for a great ride.

Fire In The Head, Coming Home and Walk With Me are all huge, bombastic rockers but with their own touches of subtlety - the acoustic passage that Coming Home builds from and its strummed verses, for instance. Classic rock-worthy arena filling swagger meets eastern melodicism and romantic lyricism. Pretty heady stuff. The Bazaar has a riff that sounds perfect for strolling through a rollicking, crowded bazaar and the choruses take the song back into dark romantic territory. Turn The Lamp Down Low, Shadows On The Mountainside and Drawing Down The Moon take bluesy motifs and infuse them with a variety of moods and characters. Shadows On The Mountainside is perhaps the most transcendentally contemplative number here, while Drawing Down The Moon roars with desperate romance. Man, that word romance keeps getting used in this review in various forms. It's hard to avoid it though, and if you know this band, you'll have to agree.

Among the slower numbers, The Badger is a gorgeous, folksy instrumental. Correspondences layers pianos, strings and other less-identifiable things, all contributing to truly gorgeous melodies and a brilliant mood - wistful at first and ardent in the climatic end section. Speaking of sections, Sister Awake stands as the very centerpiece of this album. Constructed with a complexity that is outright proggy, it moves from quieter passages through a rapid fire percussive break into a heavier passage, containing one of the most memorable and brilliant sets of changes I've ever heard. This song alone raises the album to stellar heights. It helps that the other material isn't that much worse. Silence is less stunning, but has a similar variety of moods, all perfectly combined.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: The swagger of classic rock, combined with eastern intrigue and bluesy grace. Near-perfect songwriting, great melodies everywhere, huge riffs when required, a brilliantly dark and inviting album that actually lives up to all of its considerable ambition.

Paul Simon - 'Graceland'

1986

Rating: 8 on a scale of 10, B+ on an A-B-C scale.

Simon and his buddy Garfunkel were one of the Big Three classic artists my parents introduced me to when I was just a small child. So, many years later, when I stumbled upon this album in a high school classmate's house, I was understandably eager to take it back home, load it into my Phillips tape deck and let the sounds mangentically encoded upon the tape wash over my ears. I was quite pleased by what I heard - the vocals were melodic and gripping, in that wimpy-but-brainy way Simon is known and loved for (he's sort of the Woody Allen of popular music, in a way), the lyrics were well-crafted and evocative. The music was nice, too - a rather groovy soft-rock with some nice instrumentation. A few songs into the album, though, I was really blown away. I can't recall if it was all the African girls chorussing on 'I Know What I Know' or all the African guys chorussing on 'Diamonds On The Souls Of Her Shoes'. Suddenly the extra grooviness and trace of instrumental quirk underlying the melodic pop/rock fell into place. This was Paul Simon turning in a very creditable solo album, indeed (one that has further risen in my opinion as I encountered some of his less successful previous solo ventures) but also one that was a bit more than just a Paul Simon album.

Of course, the phrase 'world music' has become shorthand for milking ethnic music for exotica value and cheap hippiefied human-family sentiments by now, and anyway Simon isn't Peter Gabriel, but forget about that and what you're left with is pretty decent. A mid-career artist not quite reinventing but certainly refreshing himself with an infusion of exotic styles and musicians, and basically creating an album that retains his own identity all over it, with a bit of extra spice for added appeal. It's also got shades of rootsy US music, zydeco and southern styles that are closer home to Simon and also gel rather well with the African stuff. Everything's founded and capped with Simon's own immaculate songwriting and most of the songs would have, with slightly more banal arrangements fit lyrically onto one of his musically weaker albums.

Not all - Homeless and Under African Skies are the two songs most directly lyrically inflenced by Simon's interaction with black South African musicians in the apartheid era, and much of Homeless is pure African vocal music. 'The Boy In The Bubble', 'Graceland', 'I Know What I Know', 'You Can Call Me Al', 'Crazy Love Vol 2', 'That Was Your Mother' and 'The Myth Of Fingerprnts' are all middle-aged ruminations on old loves, past times, relationship troubles, feelings of alienation, affirmations of identity, nostalgia, reflections on the state of the world and so forth. Standard middle-aged guystuff, but bundled up with verve and sensibility. There are some great lyrics - you could just sit down with the lyric sheet for an hour or so and ponder over its poesies, if you wanted to. It's not TS Elliot, but it is Paul Simon, and it's not for nothing that I studied some of his lyrics in poetry classes in college.

The music is mostly mellow, but memorable, with the requisite hooks and melodies. Some of songs are relatively jumpy with ultra-catchy choruses - 'You Can Call Me Al', 'Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes' and 'That Was Your Mother'. There are no weaker songs that let the material down, although 'All Around The World' is lyrically vauge, even if it is very pretty. The songs are great at evoking moods without drifting into a curdy ambient murk, and while I wouldn't call it an awe-inspiring masterpiece, it is a very good album. Full marks to Simon for taking it up a notch or two just in time to boost a sagging career and for releasing one of the most genuinely creditable albums by a classic artist in the 80s. This isn't even close to embarassing, and it's actually good enough to justify the feelings of awed anticipation I experienced all those years ago when I discovered it in my classmate's house.

The Eiderdown-Stuffing Bottomline: Mature older-guy soft rock with musical ambition and lyrical grace. Good deal, but don't forget to be good and take a spoonful of Ramones the morning after.