One Part Lullaby
It isn't like anybody has been waiting around for "the great L.A. album," but several bands (Guns N' Roses,Hole) have nevertheless tried to make it. Who would expect that it would finally be done by a hung-up East Coast Romeo who followed his love to Los Angeles and found the city strangely to his liking? Folk Implosion singer-lyricist Lou Barlow is noted for his dejected love songs, and now he sings them to a city unsympathetic and detached, made of concrete and overpasses and not one to fall in love. Barlow is lucky that John Davis, his partner in the duo, is more sympathetic to his new metropolitan muse than his roughshod cohorts inSebadoh. Davis layers dense ribbons of guitar and rhythms to re-create both the hazy pall of pollution that hangs over the city and the complex social strata that lives beneath it. Barlow's lyrics reference both his flight from the East and his "following the setting sun" to arrive in paradise. The centerpiece of this song cycle is "Easy L.A." with it Tupac-y vocoder chorus and sophisticated electronic hum. "Here I am / Never thought I'd be / Among the drifters and directors / A place for me / It's nothing like I thought it was after all." This album is less a lullaby and more a valentine to America's enigmatic oasis.--Lois Maffeo