Customer Reviews

Kissin Time

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

With 1999's VAGABOND WAYS (not relased in America until 2000), Marianne Faithfull proved that, for a woman in her 50s, she could still command the same power & attention that albums like 1979's seminal BROKEN ENGLISH proved. Granted, Marianne is not the easiest artist to listen to, let alone love. Her critical look back at her past musical career & decadence is brutally honest & not often pretty. But before giving her a thumbs-down, one needs to realize how she got where she is today & when one does, they'll find Marianne to be a little more approachable & even human. What's especially amazing is that she still has a considerable amount of fans after all this time, including her fellow artists. Her newest album KISSIN' TIME is a concentration on duets & collaborations where both Marianne & the guest are on equal footing, causing both to play off each other's strengths.

It was albums like BROKEN ENGLISH that helped establish Marianne as more than just Mick Jagger's ex-girlfriend & some would also argue that she has held up better than her former lover. The big question about KISSIN' TIME would be could an old pro like Marianne work well with the younger admirers? The answer turns out to be a resounding yes!

Since 1999's MIDNITE VULTURES, Beck has been a little on the quiet side, the normally prolific Mr. Hansen taking his time with his next artistic move. But apparently, he had time to work with Marianne & gave her some of his best material, too. Songs like "Sex With Strangers" & "Like Being Born" (which may be more sinister than it sounds) are both typical of Marianne's pull-no-punches look at her past history & Beck's new-Dylan-ish stream-of-consciousness writing style. Just as it seemed only Beck could perform his own material, the writing team of Faithfull & Hansen works out well & hopefully will create more in the future. Marianne even goes straight to the source by covering Beck's "Nobody's Fault But My Own" (as "Nobody's Fault"). Certainly one of the more understandable songs Beck has ever created (not by much, though), Marianne works wonders with this one as well.

The other big collaborator on KISSIN' TIME is former Smashing Pumpkins' frontman Billy Corgan, who not only gives Marianne some of his best material, but also his most direct. "I'm On Fire" & "Wherever I Go" are surprisingly romantic & even seductive for the usually gloomy Billy & helps gives Marianne a warm sensuality that one wouldn't have thought possible with her voice at this point in her career. An even more shocking success is Marianne's cover of Goffin & King's (popularized by Herman's Hermits) "I'm Into Something Good" with Corgan behind the boards. She just might be proving she has a heart of gold after all.

That's not to say Marianne has lost her acid-drenched commentary on the darker side of love & life. "Song For Nico" (with former Eurythmic Dave Stewart) is a condensation of the life of the legendary German chanteuse in only 4 minutes & is one song that warrants the "parental advisory" sticker on the cover of KISSIN' TIME (BROKEN ENGLISH would have deserved one, too, but they weren't around yet in 1979).

"Sliding Through Life On Charm" is probably the song most likely to offend (especially with the line mixing sex & the clergy) on the album & no surprise, coming from Pulp leader Jarvis Cocker (whose album WE LOVE LIFE has finally reached American stores). It also is one of the most autobiographical songs Marianne has ever sung with her name actually mentioned in the lyrics.

Blur is another band who's been silent for a while (since 1999's 13), but as they go about crafting their next work, they take time out to work with Marianne on the title track. Not the outright shocker that is "Sliding Through Life On Charm", it still has that song's sense of brutal honesty, but with lyrics able to be heard by virgin ears.

The remaining two songs are quite good in their own right, but they're easily obscured by the high-profile collaborations of the others. "The Pleasure Song" is written with French pop maestro Etienne Daho & is a good example of Serge Gainsbourg's odes to free love that perked up ears in the late 1960s. "Love & Money" is a short 2-minute ditty co-written with Marianne's BROKEN ENGLISH partner Barry Reynolds, with him performing most of the music. I think this is one song that could have benefitted from a better production job, giving it more room to breathe.

The success of VAGABOND WAYS must have been a surprise to the music industry Marianne Faithfull has often had few good words to say about. Whereas that album was released by an independent label, KISSIN' TIME is released on Hut Records (subsidiary of the Virgin label). With Marianne enjoying a much more fruitful career (artistically) now than ever before, maybe her time to shine has finally come & on her own terms. Of course, KISSIN' TIME isn't exactly safe for listeners of all ages, but if you want to hear a veteran artist with just as much attitude as anyone else half her age, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone better than Marianne Faithfull.

Marianne has always been an expert at bouncing back from obscurity, as with the legendary Broken English in the early 1980s. Kissin' Time sees Faithfull still at the cutting edge of pop with assistance by Beck, Billy Corgan, Dave Stewart, Jarvis Cocker, and Blur on the title track. In her book Memories, Dreams and Reflections, a short chapter is devoted to discussing the songs and the musicians on Kissin' Time. Marianne claims that the style was very deliberately 1960s retro as if it were the follow-up to her work of that decade. Not predominantly aotobiographical, the album happily celebrates love & life with a theme of fandom permeating it.

I have always associated Marianne with other famous blondes of the 1960s like Nico and Anita Pallenberg, so it's apt that she does a tribute to the Velvet Underground chanteuse with the expert help of Dave Stewart. This era produced another Nico tribute; compare the song with the same title on the album How I Loved You by Angels of Light. But I miss the emotional resonance and authenticity of 1999's Vagabond Ways. After the opening track, the ironic Sliding Through Life On Charm with its wry & witty biographical references - a song co-written with Jarvis Cocker - is the first that held my attention.

I also love the lilting pop/reggae tune Love & Money and her cover of Goffin & King's Something Good, which to my mind most closely resembles the type of innocent 60s pop she used to do at the start of her career. If it weren't for the voice of course, that has dropped to a more husky tone. My tracks of choice also includes Sex With Strangers with its ironic comments and edgy beat. So this album is the 2004 manifestation of Marianne reinventing herself, and it's interesting but not always emotionally gripping and memorable. Still, Kissin' Time deserves four stars for musical variety and humour.

This is what I call adult pop music.
Marianne Faithfull has seen highs and lows in life, and this record shows that she came to terms with her past. Her voice is unique, and musicians of a younger generation (Jarvis Cocker, Beck, Etienne Daho, Damon Albarn and Billy Corgan) helped her to write and orchestrate songs about emptiness ("Sex With Strangers"), the lives of Marianne Faithfull ("Sliding through Life on Charms") and Nico ("Song for Nico"), about growing ("Like Being Born") and about Love ("I'm On Fire" and "Kissin' Time").
The result is amazing: "I'm On Fire" made me cry, it is such a beautiful hymn! When she sings "...and everything will be alright", after all she's through it gives me so much hope, and it is very deep...
"Sex With Strangers"'s 80's-cool funk reminds me of "Sign Of The Times".
"Like Being Born" goes back to her folky beginnings.
"Sliding Through Life On Charm" is the main responsible for the "Explicit Lyrics"-Sticker. It strongly resembles Pulp's "Glory Days", I think I like the legend around it even better than the song itself (she tried to write that song for 20 years but couldn't find a rhyme, and one day she bumped into Jarvis Cocker and asked him to write it, he read her autobiography and delivered the lyrics, then she took another year and a half to understand them and this came out of it.)
The title-track with its voodoo-like repetetive guitar-lick and mantra-like vocals ("Your time will come again")rounds the whole thing off in a beautiful, soothing and uplifting way.
"Kissin' Time" is such an elegant way of being diverse!
My respect.

With it's remarkable, hypnotic, hard-rock chant of a title cut, the heavily promoted single Sex With Strangers sung (or very nearly spoken) in her trademark sultry contralto, and all the other tracks in between, Kissin' Time, Marianne Faithfull's 9th studio album since Broken English, sets a new benchmark and proves once again that as an artist, she is strongest within the element of surprise.

Though Broken English marked her reemergence onto the music scene nearly 23 years ago, Kissin' Time virtually assures the often tossed-about title of legend is justly applied. Despite being recorded in Paris, London, Chicago and L.A. as a collaboration with several additional co-writers and no less than four producers, it is as coherent and headstrong a recording as Faithfull has made to date.

The opening track, Sex With Strangers, a collaboration with Beck, finds Faithfull breathily taking smooth center stage over a clipped techno-funk back beat. And when The Pleasure Song, kicks in with a synthesized percolating bass groove, you might think that this is going to be just another techno relic of an album; but the cut morphs into solid rock, with conventional drums kicking in. "Are you with me, or without me? Are you with me now, or am I alone?" Well, alone, maybe, but certainly stronger for it. As the track ends, a solid guitar power chord crashes down seemingly out of nowhere. At 55, Faithfull is no stranger to rock, and throughout the course of this disc she defines it as her own.

Again co-written with Beck, Like Being Born reads as an answer to some questions that the artist raised in Electra, on 2000's Vagabond Ways. Despite this new wave of self-analysis, she overcomes self-preoccupation with a delicate, plaintive delivery. This is complemented by the pleasantly dreary, neo-baroque keyboards and guitars which add to the bittersweet tone.

Don't look for extreme vocal miracles here, but do take time to savor the small ones; Faithfull tends to reserve her strongest vocalization for her memorable live performances. As limited as her pipes may seem after years on the edge, she nonetheless displays an impressive emotional range, which varies in emphasis from album to album, song to song. Her primary vocal range encompasses the better part of three octaves, and on Kissin' Time as with Vagabond Ways and Strange Weather, she keeps toward the lower end. Here, the singing is straightforward and unaffected, sometimes almost conversational. On I'm On Fire, which she co-wrote with Billy Corgan, the wall of noise production puts the singer's vocals nearly in the background, but not to disadvantage. Whereas on 1995's A Secret Life (as on Broken English), she captured the full value of her unusual voice as a musical instrument, she's not as preoccupied here. And that's ok. Because Billy Corgan's Wherever I Go reads as sweetly as anything she's recorded in recent memory, and Song For Nico is sung clearly --- rich and round with passion. In her tribute to the late singer, she briefly chronicles the 1960's decadence of Warhol and Délon. This cut, like several others on the disc, is imminently ready for progressive FM radio, which has had a love-hate relationship with Faithfull over the years , in part due to her prior long relationship with Island Records which was unable to effectively choose and market singles for her in the US. The chorus, "Yesterday is gone, there's just today, no tomorrow; Yesterday is gone, there's just today, no more," is an immediate, haunting hook.

Probably most out of place here is the odd, pounding chronicle Sliding Through Life On Charm, right smack in the middle of the disc It seems to rehash the penchant for hard-core profanity that was so novel and immediate on Why'd Ya Do It? from Broken English, but the lyric is more forced and self-preoccupied. Somehow, though, in the end, it works, almost to a fault, as you wind up tapping your toes. To know the story is to love it, and at least it shows that Faithfull, whose dry sense of humor is somewhat famous, can appreciate the inside jokes within those odd moments that make up her life's history.

But fortunately, her musical genius surfaces once again in Love and Money. Now this IS a toe-tapper, which bounces along like little else I've heard before. Part '60's bar room go-go funk, with a bass and guitar to match, and part love song, the lyric is a series of questions answered by her persistent "Uh-huh", and separated in the course of two minutes and sixteen seconds by an effectively short bridge before coming all-too soon to a close.

Nobody's Fault, a cover of a Beck tune, finds Faithfull in an epic rock ballad, and purely at home. But it's the closing cut, the title song Kissin' Time, in which the sheer power of this album becomes crystallized. With it's opening bass line, slightly fuzzed, adding drums, handclaps, guitar power chords and ghostly background chants before it even reaches the full chorus, the tune is an easy contender for song of the year. It embodies everything rock is about, uninhibited, wailing vocals, a powerful lyric, hooks out to there, great guitars, bass, drums and keyboards, and that mysterious something special that all great songs have. I've tested the cut on several people I'd generally consider ambivalent about Marianne Faithfull's music, and the enthusiastic reaction is nearly universal.

With Kissin' Time, Marianne Faithfull pulls together a musical journey that transcends time and space. In the 38 years since a 17 year old Marianne achieved international stardom with As Tears Go By, she's come a long, long way. And with Kissin Time, you get the feeling that the discovery is starting all over again. Faithfull, for all her travails, seems newborn and ancient all at once, and it's this ageless quality that is so beautifully captured here.

Someone else already said this, but this album is worth every penny just for "I'm On Fire." This has to be one of the best songs she has ever recorded. It's a majestic hymn with her talk/singing about happiness and love coming to her in disguise, but being able to find the happiness and leave behind the pain. It just sickens me this will never make it to radio and become a hit for everyone to hear. It puts everything else on the charts to shame. And Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins helped her write it. This may be his best work ever as well. I could go and on about this one song, but the album is full of wonderful tracks--"Sex With Strangers" and "Wherever I Go" just two of them. I have loved Marianne for years and years and she just keeps getting better and better. Cheers, Marianne.

This new one from Faithfull is amazing! Full of...passion, electricity, and unbridled acknowledgment of the past. Here, newbies such as Beck and Billy Corgan mix it up with one of rock's most legendary muses. The combination of fresh instrumentation/programming - and choice songwriting - blend perfectly the elements of the past and present - This disc is potent, world weary, strung out, but most importantly - a really satisfying listen - Faithfull telling stories as only a well traveled chanteuse can - Melodically on the mark with a slight haze of dissonant beauty -Mmmmmmmm get this one!

About all the album "Kissin Time" has in common with 60s pop icon Marrianne Faithful's early output is--well, nothing, except that it features the same vocalist. Time has turned the once-bubblegum popster into a grizzled veteran whose anguish and emotional honesty now shines brightly in her work. Aided by a number of young, hipster collaborators (most notably Beck and Billy Corgan) who weren't even born when she was at the height of her popularity, Faithful has recorded one eye-opening record.

Corgan gets the nod over Beck in the best collaborator sweepstakes. His pop sensibilities fuel the album's most tuneful song, a New Order-ish cover of "I'm Into Something Good." Other highlights include Beck's sly "Sex With Strangers," the brutally honest confessional "Sliding Through Life on a Charm," and Faithful's ode to her late contemporary, "Song for Nico." Amazingly, with so many different talents contributing, the album still has a very coesive sound. Faithful's voice may be a bit creaky at times, but she makes up for it with her enthusiasm for the material.

Overal, a stunning album that clearly demonstrates that Marianne Faithful is still a very relevant musician, more so than her old boyfirend, Mick Jagger, who seems content these days to just play the oldies circuit.

This album is full of instant classics, of songs that could only be done by Marianne Faithfull. You may not care for the cover of "Something Good' but you will forever appreciate the sly bit of irony that it ends an album that begins with "Sex with Strangers" And then there are moments like the "Pleasure Song" where we almost think Marianne is begging her lover back to bed with "so much more love left to give". "Song for Nico" and "Sliding Through Life on Charm" make a perfect centerpiece. "Song for Nico" is one of those moments of beautiful complex simplicity while "Sliding Through Life on Charm" is a well written, well delivered rant on middle-class values. Who else but Marianne could cuss and swear so elegantly? "Nobody's Fault" and "Kissing Time" just add to the depth and range of this collection. Just keep listening to it over and over again, it does not disappoint....

Marianne Faithfull's sharp lyrics and cracked alto knock the pop starlets out of the water, and she's in top form in "Kissin Time." Rock, pop, hard-hitting songs and collaboration with the likes of ex-Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan and Jarvis Cocker make this great for anyone, even if they aren't old enough (I'm not, for example) to remember the sixties heydeys.

Among them is the wistful "Like Being Born," sultry electropop "Sex With Strangers"; the soaring, exceptional "I'm On Fire" (one of the cowritten Corgan songs); the folkier "Wherever I Go" (Corgan again); the loving ballad for the late Velvet Underground singer Nico in "Song For Nico" ("she's in the s***/though she's innocent... Yesterday is gone/there's just today/no more"), the searing, bitterness edged "Sliding Through Life on Charm"; the catchy "Love & Money"; the more lackluster title track; and the pleasant but unassuming cover of "Something Good," which is elevated to better quality by Corgan's background music.

You won't find I-love-him-so-much-from-afar or I'm-so-miserable-that-he-left-me songs on "Kissin Time." This album brings to mind dead roses, a few drugs, a little booze and cigarette smoke, and memories both tender and bitter. Marianne doesn't hold back on the nastier moments of her past, making references to Andrew Oldham and her "fall from grace" off a pedestal "I never asked to be on in the first place." You can hear the scars in her memory. ("I was only trying to please/I never got any royalties/oh no, not me... if Marianne was born a man/she'd show you all")

Her voice shows the wear and tear of time, cracking and straining a little at times (such as in "Nobody's Fault"). But somehow this flaw makes her singing seem far more appealing than oversynthesized, cleaned-up singing does. And her work with Billy Corgan produced some of the best on this album; his complex, flowing music makes a good backdrop for Marianne's voice.

It's not pop/rock as you think of it, and the album ages well with repeated listenings. Marianne's past love life may be what people first think of, but this sort of music is what she deserves to be thought of for.

Kissin' Time being Faitfull's 2002 release and is a collaborative effort with the likes of Beck, Billy Corgan, Dave Stewart and Blur. The sound is a mix between new wave, rock and experimental rock. All the lyrics are included in the booklet and some very modern art. For each track we also get info on whom plays what on the track. Allmusic gave the album 4/5 whilst Rolling Stone gave it 3/5. I am in more in line with Allmusic and give this album 4/5.