The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down

The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down (2002) ***

I almost forgot about this one, so my T. Keene page is now mildly out of chronological order.  Not that it matters:  this could have been released at any random point in the man's post-1986 career; it's not as if he's known for his dramatic shifts in style.  The problem with never changing your style is that, even if you keep releasing the same consistently good album year after year, at some point the listener grows understandably bored with the never-varying same old song.  I've read some who regard this as a particular low point, and while it may rank as the artiste's worst album (it runs neck and neck with his next one), it's still a Tommy Keene album - which means it's still highly listenable in its winning combo of punchy hard rock and keening melodic salvos.  But is it remotely exciting or interesting?  Is there anything, anything at all eyebrow-raising I can say about this album?  Yes, indeed, for as with most Keene albums, he does take at least a couple of mild ventures outside his comfort zone.  So I have precisely two interesting things to say about this CD:

1) "The Man Without a Soul," is an unpleasantly horny (instruments I speak of) attempt at swinging grit.  Fails miserably and is far o by far the album's worst (as in only actively unpleasant) track.

2) "The Final Hour," drags on for an unprecedented 16 1/2 minutes, but it's really only three separate Tommy Keene tunes inexplicably strung together into one suite.

And as typical of a late-period Keene album, he emphasizes his metallically biting guitar as much as his melodic craftsmanship, with the closer, "The Fog Has Lifted," the moodiest and most rock-oriented.  And again as typically, he kicks off the album with its best track, "Begin Where We End," a thrilling pop-rocker on the 1985 Replacements end of the rock spectrum.

Another tunefully crafted Tommy Keene album.  My duty as a reviewer concluded, can I go listen to something else?

(Again, no Youtubes.  Apparently his late-period albums play to an increasingly diminished fanbase.)  

Tommy Keene - In the Late Bright Light

In the Late Bright (2009) ***1/2

One good thing about Tommy Keene's style of music is that you know almost instantly, once the needle hits the groove/laser hits the disc/bytes upload to the speakers, is whether it's good or not.  And I recognized upon first listen that this was Keene's finest achievement in literally over 20 years - yes, it's now around a quarter century as I write this in 2011, since 1986's signature Songs From the Film.  At this late date, Keene's non-likely to convert the uncoverted, but for fans, this is a more than welcome return to form after his decade-long drought.  It would be a mistake to expect any innovations or surprises from a man now past 50 and deep within the third decade of his musical career, and truth be told, Keene doesn't do anything here that he hasn't done better in the past; it's just that, like I said, 'better' means all the way back to the mid-'80s, and Keene hasn't sounded this fresh and invigorated in years.  He's rocking harder than ever, but he's finally found a way production-wise to not do so unpleasantly - the rock crunches and punches smoothly and punchily, not metallically and gratingly (see "Please Don't Come Around").  As trending with late-period Keene, he's emphasizing his guitar chops nearly as much as his pop-hooky songwriting, and while the instrumental "Elevated," demonstrates that he can shred and tear noisily for a Jeff Beck acolyte at mid-century, it's admittedly the song stuck in the middle of the album that I always hit the skip button for:  there's really no need for it to exist except as a showcase.  The album opens with the 2:15 rush of the snappy and feelingly fragmentary title track, which shows that Keene has obviously been listening to pal Robert Pollard's GBV records, and while the second track, "A Secret Life of Stories," painfully emphasizes one of Keene's achilles heels - his clumsy rhyming schemes (there's no excuse for using the word "Hortense" in a pop song, ever - c'mon, "mints"?  "evidence"?  "wince"?  Anything would be better) - it's one of the album's highlights despite its lyrical shortcomings.  I'll conclude by noting that "The Right Time to Fly," is perfectly perfect perfection of jangly-surging power-pop, and after that there's no longer much point in track by track poring over every one of these 11 tracks:  if you know Keene, you know what to expect.  The minor variations of sound and quality of his post-'80s albums all come down to exactly how well he performs his patented'n'predictable formula each time out.  Well, good news - he's back at the top of his game.  Honestly, this is a 3.75 and thereby might inch to a low four star rating, but he's not offering anything we haven't heard before here.  All Tommy Keene albums are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Tommy Keene - Crashing the Ether

Crashing the Ether (2006) ***

In which the most strikingly consistent man in showbiz comes perilously close to making a bad record.  The problem isn't so much the songwriting - when he's on, he's on, as "Quit That Scene," ranks among his finest ever, and the Based on Happy Times-ish "Driving Down the Road in My Mind," sits well next to any random melancholy Keene ballad of wistful listlessness.  The sprightly "Warren in the '60s," and the lovely "Wishing," (which unfortunately emphasizes his annoying habit of lazily tossing off obvious rhymes) are up to his usual standards as well.  But the album's misfirings are apparent from the first track, "Black and White New York," which lives up to the crashing part of the album's title, in more senses than one:  it's a thuddy metallic drag that sorely lacks Keene's usual melodic touch, substituting loud rock dynamics for pop tunecraft.  Things right themselves swiftly with "Warren in the '60s," and the first half of the album is mostly excellent, containing all the highlights I've previously mentioned.  But the second half is much, much weaker, with the final three or four songs a complete mess - a string of unpleasantly noisy rockers that makes one wonder if Keene had misplaced his talent by fancying his strengths were that of a guitar hero rather than tunesmith.  "Texas Tower 4," drags on its hard rock bombast for over six excruciating minutes, closing the album on a harshly bum note.  Maybe all those Mission of Burma records rubbed off on Tommy the wrong way, or he's trying to keep current with grunge fashion ten years too late, and while experimentation and fucking with the formula are important directions for any artist to pursue, as a hard rocker Keene's always made a much more compelling Alex Chilton than a Ted Nugent.

Youtubes?  No puedo encontrar los videos.  Tommy Keene videos are extremely hard to find, period, much less any for songs from one of his least popular albums.

Tommy Keene - Isolation Party

Isolation Party (1998) ***1/2

There's a cover of Mission of Burma's "Einstein's Day," on here - a rather left-field choice for Tommy, and while I can't say that he improves upon the original, he more than does the song justice, with blazing guitar work that would do Roger Miller proud (the MoB guy, not the "King of the Road").  Let's talk about Mr. Keene's guitar slinging for a moment:  it's a crucial and underrated aspect of his sound.  His voice (which I like) can be thin and reedy to the point of off-putting some less tolerant (read: Top 40) listeners, but the guitars in his music are always sharp, cutting, well-toned, and very professionally played.  In fact, the more I think about it, the strongest aspect of Keene's sound is his guitar; certainly not his vocals and perhaps not so much his songwriting as the way that those lovely-jangly yet metallic-biting guitars put those tunes across.  It's by far the most interesting subject I can think of to discuss in this review, because, as you guessed it, Keene offers nothing remotely new on this disc.  At over 50 minutes and 13 tracks, it can easily get wearying sitting down to absorb it all in at one long take; you'll definitely want to play something totally different by the end of this disc.  But perhaps that's also because Keene shoves the strongest material upfront, wisely leaving the weaker tunes for second half ("Weak and Watered Down" is rather self-descriptive, though I doubt entitled with that in mind intentionally).  The first three songs are all highlights, with the album roaring out of the gate not once but twice with a pair of one-two smashing anthemic rockers, "Long Time Missing," and "Getting Out From Under You."  Then he dials it down a notch with the excellent, wistful mid-tempo nostalgia ballad, "Take Me Back," and from there on in there aren't really any more tunes that he truly knocks out of the ballpark, but he does consistently hit the ball each tune up at bat, with nary a bad song in sight.  Some boring and forgettable songs near the end, which isn't the same.  He's got this formula down cold.  Sometimes moody ("Happy When You're Sad"), sometimes jauntily '60s ("Tuesday Morning"), at his best when he's performingly an intensely driven rocker ("Love Lies Down").



Tommy Keene - Ten Years After

Ten Years After (1996) ***1/2

If you're expecting a tribute to Alvin Lee's bloozy classic rock combo, you must not know Keene:  it's yet another power-pop gem that skirts the line between alternative and mainstream rock, though by the mid-'90s an entire generation of Goo Goo Third Gin Blossom Blinds had made the patented Replacements/Keene mid-'80s alt.style the mainstream sound.  So don't complain that this sounds generic, kids, give the old man some credit, it's his style, he's entitled to it.  Some of the rockers sound a bit forced, but that's par for course on most late-period Keene albums, and anyway, "Today and Tomorrow," kicks with punchy urgency.  A pair of mid-tempo ballads are the highlights, with the stunning, "Silent Town," one of my favorite all-time Keene tunes, and the moody "Before the Lights Go Down," not far behind:  Keene is always at his best when he's the most rueful and melancholy.  Once again he throws in some alternately wistful and bitter balladry ("If You're Getting Married Tonight," "Your Heart Beats Alone"), though perhaps the country-ish leanings of "You Can't Wait for Time," were a slight - slight - mistake.  The album ends with the band running halfway through the Who's "It's Not True," before shutting off without even bothering to reach the chorus.  The sound is more Happy Times hard and dry rocking than Places jingle-jangling (I know which style I prefer, but oh well).  Another unsurprising album of really good Keene tunes; after such a long absence, it's good to have one of the few pleasures you can rely upon in this world.

Tommy Keene - Sleeping on a Rollercoaster

Sleeping on a Roller Coaster (1992) ***1/2

The commercial debacles of his two major label LPs must have soured Keene on the music biz, as this 5-song EP was his only release during the eight-year stretch between 1989's Based On Happy Times and his return in 1996 with Ten Years After.  While none of these five songs leap out as eternal Keene klassiks, he yet again releases a consistently excellent selection of tuneful, sparkingly performed songs in the style he'd patented and perfected circa the mid-'80s.  So let's not subtract points for brevity; any five of these tracks would've made fitting additions to any random Keene album at nearly any point in his career.  You have to admire a man who delivers such sonic consistency; like another web reviewer, Scott Floman said of Al Green, he's so consistently good he's almost boring - but no, not really, not boring at all.  Curiously enough, not contained herein is the title track, which wound up on The Real Underground compilation for some inexplicable reason, as stylistically it would have fit in fine (and is slightly better than the other five tracks, but only slightly).  The sound is less unpleasantly dry than on Happy Times, a mid-way point between that LP's more rockist drive and Places' jingle.  "Love is a Dangerous Thing," and "Alive," are driving pop-rockers, the first likely the best choice for a commercial single (which is likely why it's the lead track, eh?).  "Driving Into the Sun," and "Down, Down, Down," shimmer more mid-tempoishly and are somewhat less catchy but fine.  Finally, the less than twenty minute maxi-single concludes with a spacious ballad, "Waiting to Fly," with mild, very mild psychedelic touches as backwards guitars fade the record out.  And there's that.  It's on Matador, so perhaps they could attach this EP as bonus tracks on a reissue of one of the other albums like Ten Years After he recorded for the label.  Till then, enjoy it as a koncentrated dose of killer Keene. 

Tommy Keene - Based On Happy Times

Based On Happy Times (1989) ***1/2

Second time wasn't the charm for Keene and his sophomore offering for Geffen Records was another musical winner yet commercial dud.  Ditching his old band and hiring a fresh new rhythm section, Keene delivers a tougher power-trio sound that leans closer to rock than pop.  It's only a shade lesser as a whole than Songs From the Film, mostly due to an unpleasanter, dryer sound, and slightly less hooky songcraft.  Despite the harder rocking sound, this isn't as joyously danceable as some of Keene's previous work, as the prevailing mood accounts for Keene's most sour and dour release.  The title track is a ballad that would border on the listless if not for the emphatic force of Keene's bitterness, the ironic punchline to the title being, "....not the way I feel now."  Another lilting ballad, "Where Have All Your Friends Gone," obliquely answers that question by having Keene set the scene in the graveyard.  It's not entirely all bad vibes and grey skies, but it mostly is; the biggest bummer, though, is Keene's horrid, jokey cover of the Beach Boys' "Our Car Club," that situated smack at #8 in the middle of the album nearly throws the entire proceedings off kilter.  The definition of a roadblock track, its eminent and necessary skippability contrasts sharply sitting beside the preceding mid-tempo rocker, "Highwire Days," which counts as the album's strongest cut.  At points resembling a more despondent Pleased To Meet Me-era Replacements, this is yet another consistently excellent release from Keene that's quite snap-uppable if you spot it in the cut-out bins.  Peter Buck plays on a pair of tracks, offering a bit of mandolin on the closing track, "A Way Out," and cult legendary popmeister Jules Shear sports a co-writing credit on a pair of tunes ("When Our Vows Break," "If We Run Away").

No YouTubes available that I can find, this baby sank like a stone.

Tommy Keene - Songs From The Film

Songs From The Film (1986) ****1/2

Keene's major-label represents a major stylistic departure as Tommy dabbles in then-trendy 'deth-techno' screaming lyrics about S&M bondage to a gothic Eurodisco beat while metal guitars gauchely thrum....nah, just joking, Keene still delivers the same jangly, post-Byrdsy power-pop as usual, but with Geoff Emerick (Beatles, Costello) producing on a major-label budget, the sound is beefed up and glossier than his indie releases.  It's not really an improvement; Keene's vocals are more assured and clearer, but distractingly studio processed, and while the guitars sparkle and gleam more brightly, the drum sound is a tad too '80s if you know what I mean.  Not that the differences between Places That Are Gone and Songs From The Film are that vast; the superficial surface gleam doesn't distract from the meat of Keene's tunesmanship.  The album opens with a punchier but not superior remake of the title track from Keene's 1984 breakout EP, and ringingly circular-chorused "In Our Lives," doesn't disappoint the energy level.  The first two tracks promise a remarkable consistency that the rest of the LP delivers in spades, despite a short run of merely ordinary songs that sags the mid-section slightly and an ill-chosen, out of place cover of Lou Reed's scorchingly amelodic rocker "Kill Your Sons," that as track #6 seriously disrupts the flow.  The haunting, intriguingly enigmatic ballad, "My Mother Looked Like Marilyn Monroe," inspired by Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train according to Keene, is a mid-album centerpiece, and along with such bitterly melancholy fare as "Underworld," and "The Story Ends," demonstrate Keene's mastery of the balladic form.  The dizzying minute-and-a-half, blink-and-it's-over-far-too-soon fasty "Astronomy," and the vituperative "Take Back Your Letters," are two other clear highlights. 

The original LP gains a solid four star rating from me, but it's padded with the excellent Run Now EP and several outtakes as bonus tracks, making it quite the delectable bargain.  There's a one-song overlap with The Real Underground as "Back Again," makes a return appearance, but who's complaining, it's a quite welcome listen again.  That EP was more sympathetically produced by T. Bone Burnett and Don Dixon, whose understanding of crystalline sparkling acoustic guitars nails the essence of Keene's sound more fittingly than Emerick's lush-rock job.  After a pair of excellent shouldn't-have-been-outtakes ("We're Two," "Faith in Love") the CD closes with a rampaging cover of the Flamin' Groovies sleaze-blooze classic, "Teenage Head."  After all these years, this is still probably the most widely circulated Tommy Keene album and one of the easiest to find thanks to the 1998 reissue, and makes a fine, fine introduction to the man.  So hop on down to the malt shop and ask the jukebox man if you can give it a spin, willya?

Tommy Keene - The Real Underground

What goes round in a story, what comes down with the glory, can be found in the real underground

The Real Underground (1993) ****1/2

This impossible to find 23-track compilation contains the entirety of his 1984  EP Places That Are Gone that provide the first six tracks, two tracks from the 4-song Back Again (Try...) EP from the same year (a pair of Stones and Roxy covers are omitted),  and the rest consists of unreleased material from 1982 to 1992.  Given the ragtag nature of the source material, you'd expect a hit or miss collection of miscellany, not a consistently entertaining set of songs that taken together as a whole constitute Keene's best-ever collection of tunes.  At his best, which is in high frequency here, Keene's soaringly melodic, jangly pop-rock rivals the best of Big Star, which by osmosis rivals the best of vintage Byrds if not mid-'60s era Beatles.  The first nine songs are all stunningly brilliant slices of pop-rock perfection, all of them, and I dithered a bit in giving this album a five-star rating if only the remaining 14 tracks didn't waver a bit in quality.  Even so, he's consistent enough that "That You Do," and "Mr. Roland," are the only tracks I find myself regularly skipping over (the synthesizer instrumental, "People With Fast Cars Drive Fast," is too short at 56 seconds for me to bother skipping.)  There are three well-chosen and excellently performed covers that testify to Keene's good taste and knowledge of classic rock'n'roll: "Hey! Little Child," (Alex Chilton); "Tattoo," (the Who); and "Shake Some Action," (the Flamin' Groovies).  The rest display an ennervating grasp of melodic pop-rock writing skills that rivals any pop-rock melodic genius you'd care to namedrop, whether that be Roy Wood or Marshall Crenshaw - in other words, this is literally as good as melodic pop-rock gets.

Needless to say, with such a huge cavalcade of top-notch songs, such a veritable feast of richly tuneful hooksmanship, picking favorites is like trying to decide which chocolate in the 23-piece box to savor first.  But there are clear highlights; some of these songs are merely ordinary ("Andrea," "Hey Man,") and some sound like the most brilliant song ever when you're actively listening, but sink away from memory after the record's over ("Nothing Happened Yesterday," "When the Truth is Found,").  The lead-off track, "Places That Are Gone," may be Keene's most well-known song, but it's the title track that sums up for me Keene's genius for what I'd like to term 'hyperactive melancholy,' the feeling of soaring uplift and crushing sadness at the same instance that makes for the most emotionally affecting pop.  "The Real Underground," amazingly enough, seems to have been one of those unreleased numbers that only first turned up on this compilation, despite being in my not so humble opinion Keene's towering masterpiece of song.  Almost as effective is "Baby Face," a slightly haunting evocation of unappreciated beauty that constituted Keene's first-ever great ballad and still remains one of his best.  The admonitory "Back To Zero," comes on as an edited version of Dylan in the blistering "Positively 4th Street," tradition, and "Back Again," possesses a pitch-perfectly harmonized chorus hook that in all justice should have rung out from every radio in Christendom.  If you're at all interested in the guy, this is the place to start, if only it weren't long, long out of print and very difficult to obtain a copy even given modern-day downloading options.

Very few YouTubes available, but here's one, and hey, as of this date, it's gained a massive 2,829 views!  The boy might crack the charts with those promising numbers if he keeps at it. Persistence, m'boy, persistence.

Tommy Keene - Strange Alliance

Strange Alliance (1982) ***

Tommy Keene's debut mini-LP (only eight songs, with a running time of around 33 minutes) is both fully formed and formative.  He introduces a sharply chiming power-pop formula from which he would rarely deviate from for the rest of his still-ongoing career:  the mix focusing on his reedy, paper-cut sharp tenor vocals, with chimingly harmonized, sometimes even more sharply slicing guitars filling in the musical color in the Byrds/Big Star tradition.  The cuttingly jagged contours of the presentation, and the slight-but-omnipresent melancholy that suffuse Keene's dour outlook, contrasts effectively with his winsomely melodic, straightforward popcraft - his shiny power-pop tunes have an attractively mildly abrasive edge, making him much more emotionally listenable than your run of the mill cheery-bouncy power-popster.  Worshipping the high priest Alex Chilton (Keene claims that the Raspberries are his biggest influence, but Eric Carmen's influence isn't here nor ever in his entire career, remotely audible), a mild early U2 influence also shines through on this release with its overabuse of ringingly harmonized guitar effects.  The jagged little PIL guitar sound is unique to this particular record in Keene's ouvre, and would be quickly dropped in favor of a more Rickenbacker-y jangle on subsequent releases. 

Keene's sound, in other words, is still a bit tentative, and as for the songs, they are as well.  This is a not-bad-at-all record containing seven well-crafted, catchily melodic pop-rock tunes that only really suffers in comparison to his later, superior work.  The closer, "Northern Lights," the sole bummer, is a slow, chilly drag that shows that Keene hadn't quite developed the knack for writing ballads yet.  The energetic "Landscape," bursts from the opening gate with sharp rhythmic drive and along with the anthemic thud of the title track, is easily one of the album's highlights.  The other five tunes aren't quite up to that standard but offer enough reasonably memorable hooks and choruses to stick in your head after a couple of listens; the only major problem being that the band sound less tight and more draggy than they need to be.  This debut may be one of the low points of Keene's career, but Keene is one of those musicians who's so solidly consistent that even his slightly premature debut is still solidly enjoyable and should by no means be avoided by those who dig his modernized Big Star formula.  This album, which has never been reissued on CD (original vinyl versions fetch up to $100 on Ebay, apparantly) is a collector's item if you ever see a vinyl copy in the bins.  But if you don't, here's a link to an MP3 blog where you can download it:

http://wilfullyobscure.blogspot.com/2008/11/tommy-keene-strange-alliance-1981-park.html