Date: Sat, 01 Apr 2000 03:02:50 -0800
From: clark price <drywall@primenet.com>
Reply-To: drywall@primenet.com
Organization: SR dis-information
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.61 (Macintosh; I; PPC)
Subject: Andy Gill / UK Review of ANATOMY

This week's album releases /  THE UK INDEPENDENT

18 February 2000

Reviewed by Andy Gill

STAN RIDGWAY |Anatomy (New West)

Despite not having had an album released in the UK for far too
many years now, Stan Ridgway remains one of America's best
songwriters, a Dirty Realist storyteller whose observations of
the sad, soft underbelly of the American Dream unerringly
focus in on the moments when hope sours into resignation,
and idealism into cynicism.

His tales of little loser lives are characterised by a Jim
Thompson world of grifters, carnies and lowlifes making do
and screwing up, their dropped stitches sketched in telling
phrases that leave more questions begged than answered, as
Ridgway employs strategies of concealment and revelation to
keep the listener constantly revising their understanding of
events. But however much is revealed, the mystery remains.
What exactly do his characters want? What is their state of
mind? What are their intentions?

Most of the time, you don't really want to know: the protagonist
of "Valerie is Sleeping", for instance, ponders what to do now
he's disposed of poor Valerie's corpse, while the numbed soul
of "Deep Blue Polka Dot" seeks more extreme sensation to
fend off anomie, musing that "Beauty in decay can be the only
way/ When you are not". The influence of such as Raymond
Carver and Jim Thompson can be readily discerned in
Ridgway's writing, though the quirky detail, wry humour and
odd narrative twists are, if anything, more characteristic of the
Coen Brothers' films. And indeed, the sleeve design ? a
pastiche of designer Saul Bass's stylised credit sequence for
Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder ? gives clear indication
of the cinematic sensibility which Ridgway brings to his lyrics
and his music.

Like Ennio Morricone, he has a good ear for the "visual"
qualities of instruments, combining them in narratively
pleasing arrangements which proceed by mood and texture as
much as by melody: a whine of lonesome harmonica, a cold
shiver of synthesised strings, a smattering of melancholy
Euro-cinematic piano.

It's a versatile, flexible method which enables Stan Ridgway to
come closer than otherwise possible to the heart of a song
such as "Train of Thought", a deeply moving evocation of the
limitations of memory: "All the world and history burns/Like a
bad sign/ And here within my reach revealed/ The clouds part
in my mind/ I see the love that I sought/ But then I lost my train
of thought". Wherever you stand on the great Keats/ Dylan
debate, that's sheer poetry.

ANDY GILL