Great Endless Wire review from The Age (Australia)

[Brian Cady]

http://tinyurl.com/ydcgbr

With a little help from my friends
November 4, 2006

Ambitious new albums by the Who and Paul McCartney are pushing an envelope Wolfmother couldn't reach with a barge pole, writes Michael Dwyer.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING as "the death of the author" in rock'n'roll. More than any other art form, it's a medium in which the work is inextricably linked to the personality - or at least the projected persona - of the creator.

Which is why the older some rockers get, the more anxious I am to hear their new albums. I know Paul McCartney and Pete Townshend, for instance, better than many people with whom I'm actually acquainted. They don't visit often, but when they do they spill their guts, wittingly or otherwise, with eloquence only decades of intimacy can decipher.

Lord knows, the results are rarely pretty, compared to the incandescent pop sensations that rise and fall in their wake. Since the mid '70s, each certified legend has been slogging through the rock wilderness with only rare glimpses of brilliance (see Townshend's White City project of 1985; Macca's later collaborations with Elvis Costello).

But whether through pathetic loyalty or lingering gratitude, I still trust, forgive and - yes, damn it - love these old geezers more than my favourite new artists. Their sincerity, wisdom and experience are immeasurably more useful to me than the cynical repetitions of their offspring. Wolfmother's guitar-smashing charade at the ARIAs springs to mind. The music industry voted them Breakthrough Artist and Best Group in Australia. Was it because Wolfmother is so content to recycle bankable sounds and gestures of rebellion without a thought for the danger of artistic ambition?

For all their follies, failures and grey hairs, Townshend and McCartney are among the few remaining pioneers of rock, battle-scarred warriors advancing into the unknown while ostensibly fresh and fabulous newcomers fizzle like fireflies in their slipstream. Of course that sounds pretentious. So did McCartney, probably, when he insisted on supervising a classical string quartet on a silly love song called Yesterday. And so did Townshend each time he tried - and spectacularly failed - to communicate the British post-war experience in a "rock opera" called Tommy. "Expect pretentiousness," Townshend told Britain's Q magazine in advance of the Who's first album in 24 years. Endless Wire certainly is that, in the sense reclaimed by Brian Eno in his 1996 diary: to be labelled pretentious is "a compliment", he decided, to any artist committed to transcendence of themselves and their perceived "station".

Endless Wire is a spin-off from Lifehouse, the conceptual masterwork that Townshend has been obsessing over since 1972. It's his third album to pursue the story, which first predicted the internet ("the Grid," he called it) and now imagines its future as a kind of infinite closed circuit of spiritual unity. With rock music.

The back half of Endless Wire is a "mini-opera" called Wire & Glass, which draws on Townshend's blog novella The Boy Who Heard Music. "The narrator is Ray High, a rock star whose drug-abuse has led him to a sanatorium," the author says, with just a hint of self-reference. "While there he learns to meditate and begins to sense that someone is interfering with his quietude up in the place where he allows his mind to go. It seems almost as though they are using a Ham Radio, an old-fashioned long-wave radio that was the specialist precursor to the modern internet chatroom."

And so on. Roger Daltrey, the only other survivor of the Who since bassist John Entwistle's death in 2002, has described this as "the same old shit" from his musical soul mate. That he sings it with such conviction suggests that the appraisal is a fond one. Daltrey matches its thematic audacity with startling energy. One of the gentler tracks, God Speaks For Marty Robbins, is a career high for Townshend. He plays God himself, naturally, in a voice of such infinite calm it seems to suspend time. Accompanied by a pair of celestial acoustic guitars, he conjures the universe into being with the words "Wake up and hear the music . . . Wake up and hear what the people say."

It's another affirmation of his rare belief in the divinity, healing power and epic scope and potential of his craft. The same old shit, indeed. Not that he's humourless about it. The catchiest tune on the album is We Got a Hit, a song from the mini-opera in which a mythical band, the Glass Household, hits the top of the pop charts. The tune is 78 seconds long, a reflection of the fleeting nature of pop success. "We got rich and famous/ The papers at our door/ We talked a lot of crap/ They just wanted more", Daltrey bellows.

Nor is the autobiography veiled in the album's poignant closing tune, Tea & Theatre, in which the last two surviving members of the Glass Household reunite for a cuppa in their old age. "Lean on my shoulder now/ This story is done/ It's getting colder now/ A thousand songs/ Still smoulder now/ We play them as one/ We're older now/ All of us sad/ All of us free/ Before we walk from this stage/ Two of us".

It works, for those of us who still care to listen, because it resonates. For all of Townshend's dramatic conceits, Endless Wire is an album about his and Daltrey's journey from their celebrated and dangerous past and on, into eternity. In a business that caters mostly to mindless clones and transients, the fire of the old blokes' ambition is as inspiring as the spring in their steps.

McCartney's path has long been a lonelier one. This blog by St Zoltan at Last.fm is fairly typical: "All right, McCartney, you pretentious, fading old gasbag, what the hell is this? Did you compose another opera?" Actually, it's an oratorio (his fourth), and Ecce Cor Meum means Behold My Heart. The story goes that Sir Paul saw the inscription on a crucifix while grieving his late wife, Linda.

As a writer, McCartney is not renowned for putting his heart in his hands - unless he's singing about Linda. His legacy is more often seen in terms of the crafty artifice of Penny Lane and the saccharine melodrama of The Long and Winding Road. Which is why his last pop album, Chaos & Creation in the Backyard, was such a startling development. Songs unearthed an emotionally naked old man, from the unvarnished croak in his voice to sentiments of obvious personal relevance. To listen to that album a year later is almost painfully revealing.

In the light of their subsequent acrimony, it's fitting that Ecce Cor Meum, a grandiose spiritual dedication to the one true love of his life, should supersede that record. OK Zoltan, maybe it is more Andrew Lloyd Weber than Bach, but the depth of McCartney's passion can hardly be faulted, especially in the voiceless Interlude (Lament), which he claims encapsulates his grief for Linda in melody. No mean feat, one suspects, even for a Beatle.

The choral treacle becomes overbearing in the climactic fourth section, in which a children's choir sings, "There in the future we may be apart/ But here in my music I show you my heart". It's all you can do not to look away. But hey, that's old friends for you. Me, I'll put those noisy Wolfmother scamps to bed and put the kettle on.

Endless Wire is out through Universal this week. Ecce Cor Meum is out on EMI Classics.

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


 
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