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Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros

Rock Art and the X-Ray Style

(Hellcat)

 Amazon

 Lala

Joe Strummer, one of the most famous front men in the last 30 years of rock history, had disappeared from spotlights for ten years after his first solo album, Earthquake Weather, into a black hole of regret, self-doubt, and disgust with what he saw as the emptiness of rock ‘n’ roll fame. He called this period the “wilderness years”. He was not unproductive, writing for Mick Jones’s Big Audio Dynamite, producing the Pogues, composing and contributing to film soundtracks, and DJing (“London Calling” was the show), but he nevertheless lacked sustained purpose. Then in the mid-‘90s, Strummer assembled a backing band of poly-instrumentalists dubbed the Mescaleros.

Rock Art and the X-Ray Style was to be Strummer’s triumphal return from the wilderness. But return to what? In 1987’s Walker (a soundtrack to a film by the same name), everyone should’ve learned that Strummer had crossed the musical rubicon beyond the Clash’s roots-infused punk. Earthquake Weather demonstrated the direction even better: rock ‘n’ roll met world music. Of course, that was already happening in Sandanista, where the Clash moved farther into reggae and even flirted with the burgeoning rap genre (“The Magnificent Seven”, for example). Rock Art and the X-Ray Style continued this trajectory, distancing Strummer from his more famous past efforts even further.

The album’s lyrics are a smattering of forlorn, existential, and socially critical fragments. And while it is a flawed album, at times forced and nearly baroque by spartan Clash comparisons, it also has a deeply human, even tender core that earns forgiveness for its transgressions. Some songs, such as “Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll”, are memorable, lyrically and instrumentally; others, such as “Nitcomb”, beg for a mnemonic device. Some songs are also more “worldly” than others. “Sandpaper Blues” is bongo and maracas-heavy, peppered with soaring synth noises, like jets leaping off the runway, and the “boing boing” of synthetic Jew’s harps. It’s not unpleasant. Others, like “Yalla, Yalla”, have a rhythm closer to Big Audio Dynamite’s dance beats with hints of reggae and dub. They are far from the rock-heavy days of “I Fought the Law” and “London Calling”

The album’s soft-of title track, “X-Ray Style”, a medium tempo, slightly islands-infused number, is practically a metaphor for Strummer’s own gaze on the world: “Down on the border they crawl all the way / To get a clip of living with a clean-all spray…. Can anybody feel the distance to the Nile / I wanna live and I wanna dance awhile”. “Tony Adams”, the name of a famous British footballer and posterchild for recovering alcoholics, is vintage Clash-like pop-reggae meets smooth jazz (the saxophone), for better or worse. “I’m waiting for the rays of the morning sun / Somebody tell me clearly, has the new world begun”, Strummer repeats in the chorus. “The whole city is a debris of broken heels and party hats / I’m standing on the corner that’s on a fold on the map / I lost my friends at the deportee station / I’ll take immigration into any nation”. It’s difficult not to take the metaphors of party debris and deportees as autobiography.

“Forbidden City” is another world beat, bongo-heavy number (David Byrne, you trailblazer!). The song gets less world-ish in the middle, on the verge of really turning the rock on high. Actually, several songs (e.g. “Techno D-Day”) are on that verge. But they stop short, like a retired athlete returned to the field, too anxious to go full tilt for fear of pulling a muscle and embarassing herself. To Strummer’s credit, rocking out was not his goal here.

Rock Art and the X-Ray Style is not a bad album, nor is it going to make the Top 100 albums of all time. While the album is required listening for Strummer-lovers, for many Clash fans the worst part of this release is that it’s not much like the Clash. The best part of the album is that it gives an x-ray of Strummer’s songwriting, and perhaps his psyche in evolution—if you can somehow stop thinking about the Clash. Jayson Harsin

Pharoahe Monch

Internal Affairs

(Rawkus/Priority)

 Amazon

 Lala

Rarely cited, but proving to be highly influential in the wake that followed, Internal Affairs bobs and weaves through a collection of tracks that are impossible to define out of context. Held together, they form a hellish mosaic, a complex testament to the avenues a rapper can explore given a blank slate and the space to run free. “Rape”, the third track on the album, plays out like a courtroom investigation, with Monch as public enemy number one on the witness stand, playfully throwing out jabs left and right that he will “grab the drums by the waistline, snatch the kick, kick the snare, sodomize the baseline” or “turn on the 3000 stuck my dick where the disc go”. “No Mercy”, which benefits in intensity from the constantly on-edge M.O.P., where Monch brags “they’ll bury me with my SP1200” is all high drama, leading right into the most downright scary track on the album, “Hell”, featuring Monch and Canibus as two damned sinners on a death race toward the fiery gates. The album suffers toward the middle during a suite of solo tracks that pop out with a few key lines, but ultimately deflate in the shadow of the collaborations—a unique paradox that has kept him respected but never gaining the commercial hits he surly deserves. His follow up work has never achieved the hungry bite of Internal Affairs, which has caused it become buried, destined to be rediscovered. Craig Hubert