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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stan's genius shines through - a pop gem with superb production,
By
This review is from: Partyball (Audio CD)
I haven't heard all of Stan Ridgway's albums, but I was apalled to find that Partyball was one of his lesser-rated efforts according to customer reviews. I am determined to set that record straight. At the outset, I should state that I found Wall of Voodoo to have little appeal. Apart from a few cuts on the Call of the West CD, Wall of Voodoo was Stan Ridgway in the sandbox, playing around with words, sounds, and noises -- a preparatory step toward making real music. I bought two Wall of Voodoo CDs, and sold them both. After Stan left the band, they actually improved, especially the purely musical aspect of their work. Stan's songs for Voodoo were sparse, vestigal, primitive. This is mostly where I find fault with Voodoo. The lyrical tales may have been adequate to make great songs, if the musical accompaniment had been better. But I couldn't get past the poor guitar playing and bad arrangements.
When Stan went solo, the quality jumped. Each album saw a step forward in sophistication, with Partyball at the peak. It is almost a fully realized effort, with excellent production, track sequencing, clever little interludes, tremendous energy in performance, and breadth of subject matter -- always with the point of view a little askew, but suiting perfectly Stan's oddball vocal style. Partyball begins with Jack Talked (like a man on fire), a herky jerky tale of insanity, which Stan punctuates by half shouting, half singing, and twisting his mouth around the strange lyrics ("he took personality tests, and stapled them to his lower lip"), sounding as if he is on the verge of an appointment with a straightjacket himself. I Wanna Be A Boss remains Stan's magnum opus. This tale of dreaming castles in the sky builds to a near-symphonic climax, never faltering, perfectly expressing the escapism of the working class trapped in 9-to-5 drudgery. The hits keep on coming, with Roadblock, a classic Ridgway "fugitive song," a verbal portrait of small town America. A community lies in wait to ambush a man with "crazy eyeballs jumpin' left and right in time to an 8-track playing Foghat" as he drives unsuspectingly into the sherriff's trap. But at the end, everyone gets an unpleasant surprise. Stan gets a bit more abstract on the creepy Snaketrain and the tender (I See) Right Through You. These are also beautiful songs in their own way, the latter a genuine heartbreak that I find strangely moving. With Gumbo Man we are back into the subject of shady underworld characters. The cheesy 60's organ solo beats all, and Gumbo Man is so infectious they actually played it on the radio in our town. Harry Truman is more muscially contemplative. If its meaning is obscure, it is no less seductive. John Lennon's Come Together never made any sense, either. The slithery guitar playing oozes cool -- this song slides down like an oyster. Overlords is a like a little science fiction movie. The characters are counterparts to the poor grunts in I Wanna Be A Boss, only this time their bosses are intergalactic slave-drivers. I suppose this song is a little mundane, but it's still fun. If Partyball flirts with insanity at the start, at the end, it dives right into the deep end of the pool. One can make little sense of Uba's House of Fashions, but I cannot resist Stan's psyched and psycho delivery, as he sings about the strange goings-on in this high-class dress store, long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. The music marries beautifully with Stan's vocal histrionics, and then the song starts running BACKWARDS, complete with guitar solo. To my mind, this is another Ridgway classic. I consider Uba to be a fitting end to Partyball. Beyond Tomorrow is more like a bonus track. The band sets up a groove and Stan raps for six minutes, lyrics that sound like a cross between Futurama and notes scribbled on an LSD trip. Surely this is the weakest cut. Partyball is produced by Stan Ridgway. This is his vision, and he deserves the glory. It sounds as if he had a bigger budget on this album, and used it wisely, to craft the arrangements and songs with changes in mood and instrumentation and vocal delivery to keep things interesting. At the risk of repeating myself, I Wanna Be A Boss is a masterpiece. Stan is magically on target with Partyball -- he could do no wrong. The songs are melodic -- as melodic as Ridgway gets, anyway. He knew exactly how to voice the band and his own vocals so that everything "gelled." I haven't heard all of his subsequent albums, but lately his production style has been a little too spare for my taste. (There is some beautiful work on the Anatomy CD, though.) If you want prime Ridgway, this is the collection you should buy. Five stars, without reservation. (And pay attention to Robert Moore's review, below. Oddly, he was as perplexed as I that this album did not rate higher among the fans.)
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic Record,
By Guido G. Preparata (Rome, Italy) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Partyball (Audio CD)
I discovered this record back in the early nineties when I was listening to jazz and all sorts of things that had absolutely nothing to do with quirky songwriting. The video of "I wanna be a Boss" caught my attention, and I so decided to listen to the whole CD.Eventually this would become one of those very few albums that I would play obsessively for quite some time. I absolutely loved it, and it was with great fondness that I resurrected the tape from a box filled with college-era bric a brac after a whole decade- still sounds fabulous. I believe that I have seldom heard something as gripping as "The Roadblock," with that chilling line "looks like the boys at the roadblock shot the wrong the man"...Extraordinary and haunting story telling, with tremendous power. But the rest of the recording is also terrific, and very consistent. I don't find Partyball uneven in the least, as some other fans have complained. And like other reviewers, I am quite surprised that this album is not rated as highly as Ridgeway's other works. I thought Mosquitoes, which is also excellent, is in the same vein as Partyball, but that most of the other things that Ridgeway has recorded thereafter,and which I am now sampling on Amazon, do not have quite the same puch and immediacy as Partyball. I may be wrong on this--I probably need to listen with more care. Be that as it may, I consider this record a classic standing on its own in the entire production of recent songwriting. A must have, not just for Ridgeway fans.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Don't let the price fool you,
By
This review is from: Partyball (Audio CD)
At under $X, this purchase is a no-brainer. "Jack Talked" is a hard-rocking fun song. "I Wanna Be a Boss" is a timeless anthem for workers everywhere: "...I've been watching the boss carefully and he always seems to be having a ball/Then I scratch my head and wonder why I'm down here and he's up the hall." "Roadblock," like "Camouflage" from his The Big Heat album, demonstrates Stan's story-telling prowess that is unmatched in all of modern rock and roll.
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