Customer Reviews

Mister Heartbreak

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I think this is probably Laurie Anderson's single best work, although there are some great songs and stories on her other albums. But there's usually something on one of those other albums that I'm quick to hit the next button with, whereas every song on Mister Heartbreak is fascinating and interesting. Anderson's music is quite experimental, from the noises used in the production to the structure of the "songs," and there are a fair number of failures in her recorded output which makes the lack of the same on this album unusual.

I inevitably connect Anderson's sound to the minimalists of classical music, for at the same time I discovered Anderson I was also immersed in Philip Glass, an avid experimentalist in his own right. Both composures use repetitive structures upon which they overlay new sounds or slowly modify from the repeating pattern to discover a melody. However, Anderson's repetition is mostly through rhythmic patterns rather than repeated melodic passages. To break up the repetition are unusual sounds wrung out of Adrian Belew's guitar and the off-kilter percussion of David van Tiegham.

But the real reason I enjoy this album is for the lyrics, which were repeated constantly by my circle of friends in college so much that they quicklyl became catch phrases, were you only had to start a passage and everyone knew what you were referring to. Anderson's skill with language is that she is able to distill a phrase out of its common usage and make it sound new and fresh, partly through the phrasing, akin to how William Shatner would make each word a separate sentence. In "Blue Lagoon," it's the simple passage of "I got your letter. Thanks. A lot." By breaking the phrase in this way, you start focusing on each word until it becomes unfamiliar, like when you stare at a word so long that it ceases to look like that word or seems to be misspelled.

The themes here range from the literary (from the lifting of passages from Herman Melville's Moby Dick in Blue Lagoon to the Pynchonian "Gravity's Angel") to the mythological ("Kokoku" and "Langue D'Amour"). My favorites have to be the bracketing songs, "Sharkey's Day" and "Sharkey's Night," the latter with a guest vocal by William S. Burroughs, whose gravelly-voiced delivery is a perfect counterpoint to Anderson's silkier tones.

I can't necessarily recommend Laurie Anderson, because like most experimental artists, she's one that takes quite some time to get used to. However, as an introduction to her work, Mister Heartbreak is likely the most accessible and repeatedly listenable.

Mister Heartbreak is Laurie Anderson's best album.It combines all the meditative atmosphere of her earlier work with greater melodic texture and colour, making this album an altogether more pleasurable (and popularly accessible) experience.Big Science contains some interesting moments, but "O Superman" is the best of these and is still too minimalist for this reviewers' taste. Mister Heartbreak sports three unmissably wonderful tracks:the darkly humorous "Langue d'Amour" ,which climaxes with a great vocoder sequence, the hypnotic Japanese chant of "Kokoku",and "Blue Lagoon", which is without a doubt Laurie Anderson's finest hour: a superb set of textures which make one almost physically feel as though one is lying in the sun on some desert island, which then builds to a synthesizer climax of crushing intensity, which, like all great music, has an effect which is perhaps impossible to put into words.

Combining Anderson's meditation and musicality to the greatest extent,if there is one Laurie Anderson album you should buy , this is it.

The only real complaint I have is that there seem to be a few seconds missing from the beginning of the first track - Sharkey's Day -, compared to when I first heard this cd back in the mid-1980s.Has anyone else had a similar experience?

yours,

Brian Precious

Laurie Anderson's work has ranged from the tired to the sublime. Mr. Heartbreak is a collection of 7 of her best works on one album and the whole is mesmerizing. Laurie's staccato enunciation of prose is at times punctuated by Adrian Belew's guitar, at others softened by Peter Gabriel's warm tones. Excellent Birds, which features Gabriel, remains one of my favorite songs by either artist. Laurie Anderson has often blazed new trails, but as others have trod in her footsteps some of her efforts have been rendered a bit cliched. More than 15 years after its original release, Mr. Heartbreak is still so fresh and vibrant that it remains in my regular rotation.

This studio record appeared between Laurie Anderson's performance works "United States I-IV" and "Home of the Brave", and as such, contains pieces that're part of both works in very different and often expanded forms. The version of "Langue d'Amour" that's here, for example, is much lusher and richer, and more complex, than its predecessor in "United States". This album sees Laurie stretching out in the studio, getting comfy with the potentialities, and adding players and arrangements that compound the complexity of her simple yet insightful 'songs'. You can't really call them actual _songs_, though; part narrative, part verse, part stream-of-consciousness observation, part near-dreamstate...all of these ranges of thought seem to go into much of Laurie Anderson's 'lyrics', especially on this album. And as for the music...it still retains much of its freshness, its stripped-down beauty. Arrangements here can sometimes bounce along with a sense of playfulness ("Sharkey's Day") or be so gossamer-thin that they almost seem like they might blow away in a strong wind-gust ("Kokoku"). The amazing thing here is how Anderson can be so strongly evocative when using just the most basic of musical gestures; every atmosphere she wishes to put across never fails to be communicated, although sometimes this varies for each listener, so multifaceted are some of her works on this release. This is probably the best introduction to her music, with "Strange Angels" being a close second behind this.

African rhythms and percussions predominate Laurie Anderson's "Mister Heartbreak", an urban spiritual odyssey through a 'West Side Story'-like cityscape that recalls Brian Eno and David Byrne's "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts", and Peter Gabriel's (he guests and produces on the album) "Security" as Congo conscious Western music. The African instrumental intro to the opening track, "Sharkey's Day" sounds just like the opening, rallying whistles of street gangs 'The Sharks' and 'The Jets' in the Broadway musical, "West Side Story" and the album seems to use that Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim score as a blueprint for a radical musical concept of city sidewalks and African pathways cutting across the imagination like a shark on the beach. In other words, it's got a great beat, you can slow-dance to it and it's way cool.

Apparently I'm the only casual Laurie Anderson fan who has entered a review for this album. All the rest of you are hardcore!

I do believe this work is as beautifully produced as could have been in the year of its production, but it just leaves me a little cold (and, yes, I know that's kinda the point!).

"Sharkey's Day" is the high point of the album and my favorite piece by Anderson. With its ever-shifting moods it may be the most visually stimulating piece of music I've ever heard. Others have quoted some of the great lines in this piece, I'll leave that to them.

But this stuff is not for everybody. "Sharkey's Day" is one of my favorite 'songs' (it's not really a song), but my wife can't stand it! And she's not one of those "if it's not in the Top 40, I don't listen" types.

I slap this record down probably about three times a year, when it's past midnight and dark in the house. The colors and sounds that come out of my system fill those dark spaces in a way few other albums could imitate.

There's a perfect coda in the last track - a sequel to Sharkey with William Burroughs. Great stuff.

BACKING FROM ADRIAN BELEW AND PETER GABRIEL

Released in 1984, this is Laurie Anderson's third album, (it you count her rough independent initial release). It is 40 minutes long and the sound quality is very good. It is much better than the typical CD released in the mid eighties (for instance, it is much better than the original CD version of Peter Gabriel's So). It is crystal clear and has a great dynamic range.

Laurie Anderson is a perfomance artist. Many of her CD's have been simply recording the audio section of her shows. Without the other media, the CD's have been one dimensional and not very satisfying. Even some of her studio albums come off as an audio track with something missing.

On this album, Anderson goes into the studio with the pure aim of recording an album. That way, just the music appears on the album, and all the other things that need video are not present.

This is a great album of the new wave/eigthties sound. It caputres Anderson's playing and singing at her best. The song selection is also strong. She also gets great support from Adrian Belew on guitar and Peter Gabriel on many instruments.

Included on this CD is the duet with Peter Gabriel, "Excellent Birds". A different version on this duet appears on Peter Gabriel's So. It is hard to say which version is better.

Also included on this CD are a number of songs Anderson has done during her performance art concerts. Some also appear on the four CD set, Live USA. But the versions on this CD are much better because they were rerecorded specifically for an audio album.

This album shows what a mistake it is for Anderson to put out CD's from her shows. She record her shows on DVD, while going into the studio and specifically record audio CD's.

Sharkey's Day is my favorite wake up song. It's like that universal horoscope: it's everyone's day. The genius of having Wm Burrough's (now gone) voice and (never gone) thoughts on this CD hits the listener upside the head.

Our lives are unique, our problems are ubiquitous. We can laugh and cry with all humans, and even some other species...

Basically, a great release including Anderson classics such as "Sharkey's Day" and "Excellent Birds", a duet with Peter Gabriel.

This, along with Home of the Brave, is probably my favorite Laurie Anderson cd. Using state-of-the-art sythesizers and sonic technology she manages to create an amazing collage of images and scenes which treat the mind to its own image scene. Sharkey's Day, Blue Lagoon, Kokoku and all the songs infact work together to take the listener to a place which is regal in its sight and pungent with its scene.