Customer Reviews

Ghostyhead

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Get this album. If you are a RLJ fan and have not got this cd in your collection, do whatever you can to obtain a copy. In my opinion it has to be Rickie's best album and that's saying a lot as I own them all and LOVE every one of them. After a couple of listens this album will take you on a "ride" you will want to experience again and again. From the opening track of "Little Yellow Town" and the upbeat and my favourite, "Road Kill," right the way through the labyrinth of music to the final and subdued "Vessel of Light," every track holds it's own and contributes to a scope of sound you must experience. The album is currently extremely hard to get but according to the RLJ website should be avaiable soon on re-release. When it does, RUSH OUT AND BUY A COPY!!

I read somewhere once that an Artist is `the trunk of the tree'...infering that they are drawing information from one place/level of experience and the information, passing through them, presents itself on the other end...the upshot of this analogy is that the `viewer' cannot expect the branches to look or be shaped like the roots. The information has been transmogrified. Distilled.
Rickie Lee Jones is an Artist (note the capitalization).She is everything that an Artist is supposed to be; fearless where her self-expression is concerned, and heedless of naysayers.
This album is not for everyone, that is a given, but negative criticism of it tends to fall flat...the music just keeps shimmering and twisting in it`s own space, heedless.
I have always been a fan, but this recording even challenged me. The writing is so personal and truthful on some levels that it is frightening. It is truly a `through the looking glass' experience where I find myself wondering if they are her lyrics or my memories-you look into the void, and the void looks into you.
Criticisms of this kind of work are all sort of pointless, whether they are pro or con. The point is, it will make you think, feel, and react again and again...inspiring love or hate, but rarely indifference-it`s art, that`s what it`s SUPPOSED to do!
There are parts of it I love alot, other parts I find rather emotionally difficult, and yet more parts that I am not even sure I want to or was ever meant to understand.
Bravo!

This album has undeservedly become commercial roadkill, but I find it to be among Rickie Lee Jones' best and most original albums; it was surely among the top albums of 97. Critics wrote that Ghosty Head was Jones' attempt to keep up with a trip-hop/industrial trend, but the studio cuts are true to RLJ's sonic sensibilities, and some of the songs are among the best of her current live playlists, which shows that Jones did not create them to keep up with the Cobains or the Reznors. You will want to tell friends about this obscure treasure.

When Rickie Lee Jones first appeared twenty odd years ago, her impact was huge. Against the backdrop of disco and punk, she was an anomoly, incredibly unique and appealing. Musicians copied her style (the lace gloves, sheila e, prince, benetar) the beret and ciggerette attitude were the blue prints for countless t.v commercials, and a children resteraunt chain even named itself after one of her songs - that's how huge it was.
then she turns and does Pirates, a brooding and lush dive into a darker book of characters, one of whom is killed, and the others... it dared audiences to stay with her, and half of them did.
then she turned again, a strange Volcano, the Magazine, etc.
Pop Pop caused a big hub bub, when she introduced the accordian to the jazz ballad, played the chanteuse. If she would have just smoked a ciggerette and sang my funny valentine (like she did in '79) she would have landed in the glove of what people expected.
But once again she did an unexpected and new treatment. she had helped to educate a pop, teen audience to jazz ballads in 79, 80, 81, (Playboy for instance voted her best jazz singer two years in a row) But now even her jazz audience was puzzled.
so what's the big hub bub about ghostyhead?
A sumersion into dark and wonderful vision, where monsters float and voices call for gods and towns appear and disappear..
this is a fiction writer whose medium is music. An adept musician, not adept at trends, and a true stylist.
People who grew up with her music mostly don't like this, they are maybe too old for really new music, from people they know, or from anyone else for that matter. If you were under forty or thirty and heard this you would probably like it alot - alot more than chuck e or we belong together.
some thread of the old irish writers and musics is in this, and like the Irish writers, it cannot be ventured into lightly, expecting to read Sidney Sheldon, or even expecting Rickie Lee Jones, as it turns out. Because who is she? A thelonius monk, an ezra pound, imprecise and seeking, all the components of real new music are here. Not in abundance, but here nonetheless. She is the unrefined dutchess, the waitress and genius, the genius as waitress. she is not what the white men in their r.u.v.s listen to while reading u.s.a. today, that's for sure.
She is inspired, and inspiration is a thing that is not tame, and cannot arrive on time, and does not cooperate with marketing ideas.

note, i wrote this whole thing once and it did not go through so i am trying it once more. hope it doesnt show up twice, the first one was better.

Hypnotoic. Haunting. Daring. Challenging. Beautiful. So different from everything else she's ever done, and yet it fits perfectly within her cannon. Grab it if you can find it.

Evolutionary, ecstatic and ephemeral. A bleak and strangely sanctified landscape of music and imagery so profound that, even until now, it defies categorizing. Music writers, such as the New York Times' John Pareles, described his encounter with Ghostyhead by referring to the "amalgams of lowdown noise and eerie delicacy," and the "private references and enigmas." He drew attention to the stories buried deep within each of the songs; songs, "about redemption amid grimy realities, garbage and bus stations, abortion and deadly accidents." Critics often wrote about Ghostyhead as one might if reviewing a movie by Stanley Kubrick, or a modern piece of fiction, for example, one written by T. C. Boyle.

This is the record that prompted Los Angeles filmmakers, Alex and Mac Downs, to quite the project they were at work on, and drive around LA for two hallucinogenic days, filming a patchwork of scenes that would eventually be edited into an album-length, trance-like film of the record.

"I long to enter you," Ms. Jones sings on Cloud of Unknowing, one of the tracks from Ghostyhead, "with gentleness and compassion."

With Ghostyhead, she fulfills this, penetrating indelibly our musical psyche, as well as the cultural lexicon of who we are, and how it is that we define ourselves.

- PENNYHEAD

I bought this CD when it was first released. Its a shame that her former record company failed to support it. It is worth buying as an import, even at its import price. Nothing you've heard before will prepare you for Rickie's eerie, moody, delicate and sometimes rocking soundscapes. Certain songs will appeal to RLJ fans immediately: Matters, Firewalker, Ghostyhead and Little Yellow Town. It takes time to soak up the other songs and grasp what RLJ is doing here. Repeated listening reveals that it is still Rickie, but with the courage to grow and experiment. This is a brave recording by a terrific artist who insists on doing it her way.

I want to thank all the positive reviewers for this CD, because, despite some pretty bad reviews elsewhere, I bought Ghostyhead on the strength of their reviews.

The album floored me.

I tend to like older RKJ albums, but this comes close to beating even Pirates (my absolute favorite). That says a lot for Ghostyhead in my book. There is a deep, soulful beauty to this haunting music, and a sense of personal artistic risk. It has me admiring RLJ all over again, and awed at what great music can be missed by the general radar screen out there.

I can not believe this is out of print, this has to be one of Rickie's most creative and enthralling CDs, not to mention a hypnotic drum and bass style collection of trance music.
Seductive. Puts me into another head space.

To counter what a previous reviewer alleged, I have been a Rickie Lee Jones fan since her first album and I'm over 40. I think this may be her best album to date. It is a shame that it went out of print so quickly. Yes, it is VERY different from anything she had released before. Hooking up with producers of electronic music resulted in RLJ getting a musical face lift of sorts. Not that she needed to change...I could listen to almost any RLJ album over and over (except the dreadful and overrated Pop Pop). I think one of the things that is most compelling to me about this album is that it is SO unique and SO different from the rest of RLJ's catalog. Her lyrical style remains intact, but the funkin' drums and bass on many of Ghostyhead's tracks, and the spacey electronic noises behind others, add an edge that I find extremely compelling. It can also be trance inducing -- for a period of time I went to sleep listening to it every night!

While I would agree that anyone who thinks that a Rickie Lee Jones album should sound more like other pop/rock records musically (acoustic and electric guitar, bass, drums, piano) would be disappointed with this, any true RLJ fan will be able to see/hear/feel the art she presented here. That is what has kept me buying every RLJ album for the past two decades -- she is obviously an artist who engages in a creative process in order to release an album, not focusing on how well it will sell. This is an unusual approach for someone who previously had a top 10 hit. Instead of trying to duplicate "Chuck E.'s In Love", RLJ keeps making fresh and innovative albums.

Oh -- this album sounds GREAT with headphones on.