Mister Heartbreak

Laurie Anderson

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 25, 1990)
• Original Release Date: 1984
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Warner Bros / Wea
• ASIN: B000002L5R
• Also Available in: Audio Cassette  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #45,843 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still kicking after all these years, August 28, 2001

By	Ed Hotchkiss "Pegleg Ed" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Laurie's Best, June 4, 2001

By	Mr. B. I. Precious (London, Greater London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great introduction to Laurie Anderson, February 4, 2006

By	Glen Engel Cox "www.engel-cox.org" (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.