Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Endless Wire

[Brian Cady]

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06306/734887-42.stm

THE WHO 'ENDLESS WIRE' (UNIVERSAL)

Twenty-four years is a long time between albums, and you have to figure it has something to do with the fact no one was pining for a new Who album after 1982's "It's Hard."

In the interim, Pete Townshend put "Tommy" on Broadway, Roger Daltrey murdered Who songs with orchestral backing and John Entwistle joined Keith Moon in heaven's rhythm section.

Now, The Who -- reduced to the dysfunctional Townshend-Daltrey duo -- has finally added to the canon, and leave it to Pete to make it as complicated as possible.

Rather than a simple studio album, "Endless Wire" is a package of eight new songs that gives way to a 10-track mini-opera called "Wire & Glass," based on the Townshend novella "The Boy Who Heard Music." It also comes with a five-song bonus DVD, "Live at Lyon," recorded in July.

It opens with a sly synthesizer nod to "Baba O'Riley" and, sure enough, there are moments where the Half-a-Who manages to recapture some old glory, on the strength of Daltrey's still-rugged vocals and Townshend's stabbing guitar work. "Fragments" is a fine opener, a piece of twinkling, metaphysical pop about us all being "a billion fragments exploding outward."

"Mike Post Theme," a rocker about how the composer's TV theme songs represent the comfort of the little things in life, could have been ripped from "Who's Next." Same with "Black Widow's Eyes," if you can get past the bizarre idea of the singer falling in love at first sight with a terrorist about to blow up children. "It's Not Enough" is a solid radio-friendly rocker with Daltrey belting and Townshend windmilling.
"A Man in a Purple Dress," one of two tracks written in response to "The Passion of the Christ," is a protest song in the "Masters of War" vein, but the result is unbearably self-righteous, even if you side with Pete over the priest. If you can listen past the first notes of "In the Ether," on which Daltrey's vocal cords seem to have been hijacked by Tom Waits, you have more tolerance than me.

Side two, "Wire & Glass" is Townshend's fastest-moving rock opera, built on one- to four-minute songs, ranging from punchy rockers to show tunes. It's another weird fantasy, concerning an old rocker, now institutionalized, who dreams of turning people into music. From his cell, he observes three boys -- Christian, Jew and Muslim -- forming a rock band and going on to fame only to have the Jewish one shoot the Christian in a big Central Park concert. OK, whatever.

In sum, it's neither good, bad nor particularly memorable. Aside from the fact they've killed off Doris Day before her time in a list of celebrity ghosts, the gutsy "Mirror Door" is the only track that has any reason to exist outside the cycle.

The good news is that Daltrey and Townshend, in their 60s, can still sound like a reasonable facsimile of themselves. The less good news is that we've got 19 new Who songs and just a few keepers.

-- Scott Mervis, 
Post-Gazette pop music critic

 
-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com


 
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