Consonant

Consonant | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (April 9, 2002)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Fenway Recordings
• ASIN: B000063ITK
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #188,260 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Blissful

2. Call It L---

3. Buckets of Flowers, Porno Mags

4. Who Touches You Now?

5. John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things"

6. Not Like Them

7. Post-Pathetic

8. That Boston Life

9. 3 A.M.

10. The Kiss

11. Details of Attraction

12. What a Body Could Do

13. Perfect

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mission Accomplished, April 11, 2002

By 

Peter F. Stubbs (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Consonant (Audio CD)

Listening to this recording, you'd never guess that Clint Conley, best known as Mission Of Burma's Bassist/Co-Singer had been essentially absent from music for nearly two decades (one split single doesn't count). Re-debuting with his first proper band recording since Burma's break-up in 1983, Conley handles guitar, vocals & songwriting (with Holly Anderson supplying lyrical foundations on nine of the tracks) & is abetted by members of Come, Bedhead & Fuzzy.
Enough with the facts, how is the album? Great. The only reason I don't give it five stars is the daunting task of living up to Mission Of Burma. Conley's songwriting voice has lost little over the past nineteen years & his singing voice has lost nothing. If anything, Conley's various strengths and facets are amplified by the passage of time; the melodic "Blissful" is as catchy as anything on Vs. or Signals, Calls & Marches. The sullen, bitter "Call it L---", an examination of outside influences on a less-than-solid relationship, is as good in such a different way. The anthemic Burma sound is supplanted by a gentle wistfullness, full of fond memories ("That Boston Life", "John Coltrane's 'My Favorite Things'") and still painful regrets ("Who Touches You Now").
I suspect this is where Conley would have ended up even if he'd been making music for the last couple of decades & I'll always wonder what happened to all the potential music from that time (I'd give my right leg to hear the 1984 follow-up to Vs.). That said, I couldn't be happier with this album. Well, that's a lie. Mission Of Burma could knock out one more for me.
Buy this. You need it.

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars four stars if the lyrics were better, May 17, 2002

By 

Joseph Murphy - See all my reviews

This review is from: Consonant (Audio CD)

I nearly wrote a scathing and nasty review of this album based only on its lyrics but I reconsidered after reading a piece on Consonant in the Boston Phoenix in which Conley admits to being less than happy about his lyrics throughout his musical career. Gotta give him props for recognizing his limitations.

That said, I have to ask: What made him pick Holly Anderson's lyrics? Her choice of phrase is maddeningly inconsistent, and usually within the same song. At times I feel like she picked the perfect little couplet, concise and powerful. Take this phrase, which I assume is from her side of 'Post-Pathetic', the lyrical collaboration with Conley: ("His method: Lift skirt over her upraised arms / Her black high heels the last thing on.") It's imagery. It's great, really, but a few lines later we get this most trite phrase (don't know whose it is): ("I lobbed a bomb and used that word: 'love'"). Blech.

That's the kind of frustration you'll get: songs with great catchy hooks and lyrics that betray your sensibilities at every turn.

That out of my system, I can recommend this record on the merit of one song. Consonant's debut is worth it for 'What a Body Can Do', a song which was originally an instrumental given to the band Busted Statues (this according to the Phoenix article anyhow. Never heard this song in any other incarnation.)

The introductory bass line is menacing and melodic... Conley's frail voice with all of its beautiful roughness enters in on the first lines then the band comes down hard, strong and powerful, celebrating the young lust of the song's theme. It's all about a new and astonishingly vital, physical love which is insatiable ("We couldn't ever make enough time for lips and hips and arms..") and it is presented in just of a few lines of Anderson's and Conley's. This is the concise imagery that makes a song WORK. It is the Cliff's Notes to the Old Testament's 'Song of Solomon'... and it gets everything right.. natural imagery (seasons changing... animals... fruits), physical exertion, manifestations of desire in the pursuit of one lover for another. It's near-perfect rock and I am dying to know the primary chord of the verse and to hear the isolated vocal of Conley's run, Beefheart-like in its range, from the high range of ".... body" to the gutteral "could do" in the second chorus. That just sends chills down my back.

The listener is going to understand the entire package, swallow it whole and make it part of him/herself. Next time trust us to hear the story of the songs with out telegraphing it to us.

1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Triumphant return to form, July 12, 2003

By 

J. Sneaker (Nowhere you've been) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Consonant (Audio CD)

Although Roger Miller wrote the vast majority of the songs in Mission Of Burma, it was Clint Conley who wrote the classics that everyone remembers them by...."Academy Fight Song", "That's When I Reach For My Revolver", "Peking Spring"....it's hard to tell whether anybody would've cared about the band if not for those songs. Although the post-angst and surging intensity of MoB's style is missing from Consonant's debut completely, Clint's ability to come up with amazingly infectious melodies that will always stay with you isn't. He hates his own lyrics, but I like them. I think they're honest and heartfelt, yet without being cheesy(see "Not Like Them" if you want to understand what I mean. It's beautiful). And unlike MoB, there's two guitarists in this band, so wonderfully jangly catchy riffs abound(see "The Kiss" for a fine example).
Despite 3 of the band members hailing from depressing, "slo-core" bands, these songs are, for the most part, upbeat and happy in mood; except for the dim "Call It Love" and the darker "Who Touches You Now?", every song is bright and cheerful, yet haunting and underlined with melancholy throughoutAnd every song is great. If you're wondering whatever happened to good rock n' roll, or if you're a curious Burma fan, or if you just like weird poetry written by a woman where one letter in each line is capitalized and read vertically downward, spells out the names of different flowers, you need this. Great songs. Great production. Clint, what took you so long?