Barry Adamson – Cold Black Preach
One of my favorite moments in life in settling down in my seat in a darkening movie theatre, eagerly watching the projector flicker to life and waiting for the film to start. At that point, everything is possibility. This very well may be the best movie I’ve ever seen, and the anticipation is overwhelming. It usually only takes a few minutes before I realize that this is not the best movie of my life, but that golden moment of anticipation is gloriously exciting.
A deep love for the powers and possibilities of film infect many musicians, none more so than Barry Adamson, who has been creating soundtracks for non-existent films (and a couple of existent ones) for years. This track, in particular, sounds exactly like the opening of some dark film noir adventure, with its three discontinuous beginnings and the subtle building up of tension with low brass and bass lines and weird squealing sound effects. Then, it suddenly explodes into thunking beats and brittle high hats and we’re off and running in a frantic car chase down a rain-slicked street.
Formerly a member of the early new wave group Magazine (as well as Visage and a stint being a Bad Seed for Nick Cave), Barry Adamson has since gone on to score a series of private movies that only he sees. The music is dark and disturbed, but lush and seductive at the same time – it has much in common with the music of David Lynch films and, in fact, he contributed to the soundtrack of one of Lynch’s darkest and most idiosyncratic visions, the nearly impenetrable Lost Highway. Fascinated with the textures and motives of film noir and propelled by disturbing inner demons of race and sex (it seems as though he had a black father and a white mother and that has caused him no end of grief), Barry Adamson tumbles big bands, loose lips, and the echoes of domestic abuse together to create a rich and heady broth. His first solo release, Moss Side Story, predates trip-hop by more than a decade, shuffling lounge jazz, sleepy beats, news breaks, horrifying sound effects and damsels in distress into a brilliant audio noir pastiche. Wonderfully evocative and enticingly vague, the album dares you to come up with a plot and stylized visuals as powerful as the “soundtrack”.
His darkest work, Oedipus Schmoedipus is a disturbing, midnight ride on an emotional rollercoaster – at turns funky, delicate, and horrifying. Some of his tracks are so breathtakingly dark and frighteningly dense as to be almost unlistenable – at least alone with the lights out. The raw ugliness of some of these tracks makes them compelling, but they aren’t always what you want to have pop up randomly in the middle of a party, so this disc is best consumed by itself.
In fact, a lot of his work is dependant on context, and he takes great care in constructing his soundtracks to get the flow and textures just right, which is why a best-of package like The Murky World of Barry Adamson isn’t as successful as one might hope. The pieces are good are their own – some better than others – but they really shine in the context of the album they were released on.
For pure, boiled down funky essence of Adamson, my recommendation is his EP The Negro Inside Me, from which this cut was taken. All meat, no filler and seriously funky. Unfortunately, this otherwise superb disk is severely marred by an excellent opening track (The Snowball Effect) that is destroyed by his unfathomable decision to overlay the stunning beats and seductive orchestration with a long answering machine message from his publicist regarding some upcoming interviews. What the hell were you thinking, Barry?
But this track is all good. I especially like the way the plodding brass lines play counterpoint to the frantic rhythm section, giving the track an almost regal momentum. And I swear that middle section, with its long, slow, menacing low brass melody, is lifted directly from some of the incidental music from old Scooby Doo cartoons.
The Negro Inside Me makes musically explicit Adamson’s concerns with racial stereotypes and dogma. Proud of his heritage, and unfairly judged because of it, Adamson often uses his music to explore just what “black” means. The Negro Inside Me covers a number of basses in what used to be called “race music” – jazz, r’n’b. hip hop, urban contemporary, sleazy French sex pop (a cover of the lurid Gainsborough/Birkin classic Je T’Aime…Mai Non Plus Moi (roughly, I love you…but not more than me)), in an attempt to find out just what it means to be a black musician, and just what makes black music black.
Race is a theme he returns to time and time again, whether by a horrific recounting of a lynching, by playing with musical/cultural stereotypes (the sizzling ska version of the James Bond theme – where her majesty’s ultimate spy boy is reborn in a Kingston shanty), or by adopting stereotypical personas – some of the tracks on, especially, As Above So Below and The King of Nothing Hill reek of the swollen libido and basso profundo soft porn of Barry White.
Rarely given the respect he deserves, Barry Adamson has carved out a unique niche for himself in the pop landscape, and his music is as viscerally exciting as it is intellectually stimulating.