Editorial Reviews Music Review:
Music Review
William Walton: Belshazzar's Feast/In Honour Of The City Of London
Music: The Other Side / El Otro Lado
The Music of Life/Joseph Curiale
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With his creative light hidden firmly under a bushel, Chris Knox continues to bake up fresh and flaky pastry from the scratchiest of scratch. Better known as the prolific songwriting half of New Zealand's magnificent and messy Tall Dwarfs, Knox positively drips with the kind of hooks, melodies, and daft-smart lyrics that most pop hacks would trade a body part for. On Yes!!, his sixth solo venture, Knox has stepped up the production from his usual, whacked-out, low-fi chicanery toward a slightly higher plain where his guitar is mostly tuned and the percussion is less spasmodic. Among the hipster contingent, Knox is a songwriting pharaoh, rubbing elbows with revisionist pop-hoppers like Robert Pollard or Lou Barlow, and this time it sounds as if he wants to let a few more people into the fan club. Not that this is at all a polished affair (he plays everything except the bagpipes), but Knox's voice flows through the mix with more clarity and less clutter. His lyrical mindset is still tuned to the comic and frightening misadventures between man and woman, like "Uncoupled" a bulls-eye jab at the transitory nature of being in, and out of, love. Yet even his simplest observations shake with universal significance: "We're just potential/a sub-atomic dance/you know there is no pattern/just randomness and chance" ("The Uncertain Principle"); "This may be the time of your life/so take it and live it completely/you don't get to do it all twice" ("Penultimatum"). As a summation of his underappreciated brilliance, Knox naturally puts everything into perspective: "I don't have a heart of gold/I don't have a silver tongue/all I have is flesh and blood to give/I don't want a life of fame/I don't want enormous wealth/All I want is somewhere I can live." Well said. Pay the man, you Philistines. --John Chandler