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The Worley Gig: Music and Mayhem in New York City by Gail Worley Urban Hymns and Sci-Fi Lullabies Around the last week of November each year, it's time to ponder and write up a list of the year's Top Ten CDs. This is a lot of fun for me and I enjoy checking out how my list will compare with those of my peers, as mine is almost always completely different from any other rock critic's. For example, it is my unshakable opinion that the best record released in 1997 was Thin Lizard Dawn's debut on RCA. My taste isn't based on how many other people share my opinion. I like what I like. Page through Spin and Rolling Stone and you will see Radiohead's OK Computer listed ad nauseam as a number one pick. I don't own that record. My 1997 Top Ten included outrageously boss records like Ivy's Apartment Life (Atlantic) and Jack Drag's Unisex Headwave (Hepcat). I don't know who's fault it is that the latest releases by Sleater Kinney and Yo La Tengo didn't find their way into my mail box either. And I can't exactly put them on my list if I haven't heard the music. Plus, originality has to count for something. In this respect, I can liken rock criticism to dog sledding: If you're not the lead dog, the view never changes. Two very deserving releases didn't make it onto this past year's list, owing to either a late arrival or my inability to actually get the CD into my disc player until almost December, and that's just a shame. Aside from the fact that their cover of the Stones' "Bitter Sweet Symphony" was the single of the year, The Verve's Urban Hymns is just absolutely fucking brilliant and, dare I even say it, a perfect pop record. By the time the third cut is playing, you already know you've heard one of the best records of your life. If I was on acid right now I'd probably say it's the most perfect record ever made, but drugs can make you say a lot of things. A song like "The Rolling People" can be analyzed over, under, sideways and down, but what it comes down to is a seven minute, full-on psychedelic trip - inducing me to see paisley patterns on the air so thick I have to cut through them with my hands just to get to the CD player to hit the "repeat" button - that jams like there's no tomorrow. The Stone's haven't done anything even remotely this mind-bending since Their Satanic Majesty's Request, and that pales in comparison. Richard Ashcroft is a genius. Labeling The Verve "Brit Pop" doesn't even come close to doing justice to music that is lush, transcendent, provocative, universal and heartbreaking. And who is writing ballads these days with better lyrics than "The Drugs Don't Work"? The answer of course, is no one. Except maybe The London Suede. The British tabs say the battle of the bands is being waged between Oasis and Blur (two great bands, don't get me wrong) but the real meat-eaters - the boys who should be taking off the gloves and rolling around in the gutter together for the title of Greatest Rock and Roll band in the Universe - are The Verve and The London Suede. Sci -Fi Lullabies (Nude/Columbia) is an incomprehensibly euphoria-inducing two disc (!) collection of Suede B sides and import singles from the past five years. Believe it or not, every song is great! Brett Anderson almost alleviates the grief I feel at the real certainty that David Bowie will most likely never make another decent record. I'm not quite hip to his sexual orientation, but I am pretty sure he could give Morrissey a run for the money if he set his mind to it. Perhaps it's song titles like "My Insatiable One" and "Killing of a Flashboy" that make me suspect Anderson spent a good number of hours as a teenager copying Freddie Mercury's stage moves and singing along with Sheer Heart Attack and A Night at the Opera. But maybe it's just a style thing. Still, the gauntlet that was thrown down by Mercury has been picked up by Anderson, and I say Bravo! Sci-Fi Lullabies is so packed with delicious morsels of sweet rock it is like a box of chocolates where each piece is different, yet each is your favorite flavor. The dreamy "Big Time" is a ballroom dance-floor fantasy that turns Anderson into a modern day Sinatra and "My Dark Star" sets a mood of exotica somewhere between wistful romance and hopeless melancholy, while the aforementioned "Killing of a Flashboy" is this record's "Rebel Rebel." I've said it before, but it bears repeating that trying to accurately describe really special music - the kind that gets inside your brain and your gut and somehow changes you - is like trying to explain what an orgasm feels like to a person who has never had sex. The only way to really know what it's like is to experience it for yourself. The best advice I can give you to start the new year off right is to suggest you haul ass down to the local record emporium right away and pick up the two best records you didn't buy last year. "Shaking on the scene like a killing machine - here we go!" Gail's Dating Tips It'll be my Birthday in a couple of weeks; a day I share with a certain holiday called Valentines Day. Due to my luck with men these past couple of years, however, I've come to refer to it by another name: Valloween. In celebration of Valloween I offer the following guidelines for men who hope to score with their ladies on the 14th. Ways to make sure you will not be getting any sex (all based on actual blind dates I have been on) 1. Ask me to split the check with you. 2. Be over an hour late to our date. 3. Tell me you look like that hot guy from ER, but resemble a cross between Woody Allen and a middle Eastern terrorist. 4. Claim you are six feet tall but be about my height (5'6"). 5. When I look at you from across the table, tell me to "Stop staring" at you. 6. After a movie ending at 9 PM, announce that you are "too exhausted" to go out for food and really "just want to go home and crash." 7. Tell me about other women you are fucking. 8. Show me a picture of your child by an ex-girlfriend, whom you didn't care enough about to marry, yet somehow forgot to use birth control with. 9. Light up a cigarette and blow smoke in my face. 10. Confess that you are unemployed, and ask if I can help you get a job in the music journalism field. 11. Forget how to speak. 12. Don't shave. 13. When I ask where we are going for dinner, say "Some place cheap." Next Month: A true story of dating success (at last!) (The Worley Gig regularly turns in The NY Hangover.) E-Mail Gail
Worley Previous turns of The Worley Gig: The Worley Gig #1-- Summer, The Rules The Worley Gig #2-- All Tomorrow's Parties The Worley Gig #3-- Weaselfest '97 The Worley Gig #4-- How I Spent Summer The Worley Gig #5-- Random Excerpts From My Ass-Kicking Life The Worley Gig #6-- Christmas Kicks Total Ass The Worley Gig #7-- She's About A Mover The Worley Gig #8-- The Goddess and Pig Watts
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