Acoustic-Electric Guitars
Animal Serenade
Amazon. comLou Reed may have been a reluctant icon for the smart, art-fueled post-classic rock upheavals his efforts with the Velvet Underground and early solo albums inspired, but he’s gratifyingly become one of the genre’s wisest and most beloved godfathers. This two-plus hour live double-disc collection captures the 62-year-old Reed onstage in Los Angeles in 2003 on the heels of his ambitious, if commercially disappointing tribute to Poe, The Raven. Yet despite that unpromising cont. . . More >>
Animal Serenade
[eba kw="Acoustic Electric Guitar" num="1" ebcat=""]
OK. It’s a different look at the songs. But, why not try to use the absence of the noise of the drums to sing better? No effort to reach the right tune?
huge lou fan. these are some of his best songs ruined by antony. im not sure who this freak is, but he has an incredibly annoying voice, and is clueless to rock. maybe its what i needed to get off lou. eddieturtle73@hotmail. com
i havent actually got this album, but i saw the set when lou played in london, and it was a good gig, so im guessing the album is good too. one of the highlights of the gig was hegartys lead on candy says. the same hegarty who recently won the mercury music prize. so a big boo sucks to whomever was hating on this album with their one star ratings.
I’d assumed that Lou’s best days were long behind him; besides just how many live albums can one artist release, right? I bought this because I’m a big fan of background vocalist Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, and it was worth the price of the set alone for Antony’s lead vocal performance on “Candy Says. ” But here’s the real surprise: at 60+ Lou Reed is still fascinating! In other words, Antony is the sweet icing on a pretty grand cake. Imagine my surprise!
Sitting through a Lou performance these days is a trying exercise in patience and tolerance. It’s not just the stream of mediocre material he’s poured out almost indiscriminately (nearly EVERYthing since the fateful “Magic & Loss”). No, it’s worse than that. It’s Lou’s ego. Offstage, you’d just ignore a person so full of himself, or perhaps you’d teach him a lesson and slap him a fresh one. After putting myself through “Animal Serenade” I decided to put a lid on it and publicly demand: “Lou, I want my money back. Contact me at the above address to find out how you can make amends. ”
For the unbelieving, let’s start with the ‘songs’. Smalltown, Tell It To Your Heart, Vanishing Act, Ecstasy, Revien Cherie are all downright sappy, stupefying moments begging for an idea, any idea, to lift them out of their deathly boredom. And that’s only the 1st cd. Although Lou manages to inject life into How Do You Think It Feels and Men Of Good Fortune (the ONLY highlights in this DOUBLE album), he makes The Bed sound pathetic and pointless while Venus In Furs goes on forever in search of a pair of balls (in spite of an uncharacteristically spicy cello solo). And we’re still on cd 1.
Let’s bridge the 1st and 2nd cd’s by broaching the subject of Vocalist Antony Hegarty, since he manages to stain both of them. Recruited by a ‘what-were-you-thinking’ Lou to sing back-up, Antony is allowed to take lead on 2 tracks, including the once-charming Candy Says (one of the reasons I bought this album!). Oh Lord, next to Antony’s vocal timbre/style, sugar tastes like salt and turtles move at the speed of light. Slurpy saccharine in slow motion — sheer torment.
Come to think of it, I won’t even go into the songs on cd 2 (the highlight is a perfunctory run-through of Heroin).
Now for Lou’s ‘persona’ throughout the affair. Lou obviously feels free to start babbling in the middle of any song, stopping the musicians in mid flow. And then, 2 minutes later, re-starting where he left off! Will I ever listen to this song again? Of course not! In fact, I won’t ever again listen to this album’s version of Street Hassle either (another reason for originally buying this cd). Why? Lou’s intro (that goes way into the song) compares his “great monologue” (Lou’s words) to the work of Burroughs, Tenesee Williams, other luminaries, and “maybe a little Raymond Chandler”! And then he tells us, “you mix it all up and you have Street Hassle”. Really Lou??? If I mix all these literary geniuses I get YOU?!? How amazing, how embarrassing, how sad. Oh, but there’s more. By the time Lou gets to Poe’s “The Raven”, he announces that it was “torture” for many us to read in high school, “BUT it’s been REWRITTEN by ME,” no less. Lou has SAVED “The Raven” folks — thank you Lou!!! (As for the ‘song’ itself, if it can be called that, it’s a shapeless swamp of background noise — very ‘avant garde’, I’m sure — with Lou RECITING the lines, quite forcefully too. NO singing, NO melody, just 10 minutes of noise and a line by line recitation. Hey Lou: I took a High School Drama class too. )
I bought this album with the fading hope that Lou would at least entertain me with new versions of old classics, since his songwriting no longer seems salvageable. It’s a lost cause. Unless you’re the fawning and impressionable sort (as most in this audience appeared to be), I don’t see how Animal Serenade could fail to be thoroughly depressing.