Simon Reynolds gone Green

Simon Reynolds raves about Scritti Politti's White Bread Black Beer:

The new album weaves together elements of everything [Green] Gartside has ever loved and revisits every stage of his nearly five decades-long journey through music. The Beatles are here, there and everywhere on the record; T. Rex and the Plastic Ono Band meld on the deliciously stompy anti-Jesus ditty After Six; Gartside's pre-punk passion for folk-rock and traditional English music is audible in his guitar playing; and there is hip-hop in the beats and R&B in the production's gloss

Which makes me suspicious. The last time Green flirted with the banality of commerical pop he made pap (1988's Provision). Not only is it too easy for a music journalist to follow a meme issued by a notoriously fickle artist (Green Gartside's married! He stopped drinking! Now he'll write REAL tunes!), but it's ever so slightly dismaying for Reynolds to discard his own ambivalences about Green's meta-music, especially when Rip It Up & Start Again was so eloquent about fleshing them out (about 1985's Cupid & Psyche '85 Reynolds writes that Green's "oddly depthless lyrics" established "the lover's discourse maze, a chain of foolishness along which desire travels endlessly, looking to heal the primal wound of lack at the heart of being," after which he expresses muted dismay that Green's sudden careerism matched the narcissism telegraphed by Cupid's syndrum beats).

Now I will play "Perfect Way" and "Absolute" at earsplitting volume.