Album Review: Concrete Blonde, "Walking in London"

Walking in London - not the easiest task, as anyone who's ever tried to scythe a pathway down Oxford Street through the living Hell of German tourists, Hari Krishna's, and born again socialist workers, will testify. But then, with this eagerly awaited follow-up to 1990s Bloodletting, LA 's CONCRETE BLONDE are also attempting a tricky manoeuvre, namely crossing over from Sub-Pop cult acclaim to mainstream success - so maybe there's a metaphor in there somewhere for folks.

The line-up remains unchanged: Johnette Napolitano on bass and stadium-rocker-from-Hades vocals, Jim Mankey strangling rifts from his lusty guit-box, while Harry Rushakoff once more resurrects his snare-in-a-bathroom-the-size-of-China sound.

But perhaps recent opening slots for the likes of STING have gone to their heads, Walking in London is chock full of strained amphitheatre anthems, generic affairs with titles like "Woman to Woman" and "Why Don't You See" lacking any hint of intimacy or subtlety, in other words US top 20 fare.

So it's ironic that when the band swoops into "Les Coeurs Des Jameaux" an untypically retrospective ballad, the album really starts to fizz. My tape deck reached repeated digital orgasm over this one as Napolitano performs the most remarkable vocal striptease, peeling away layer after layer of her trademark howl to reveal a naked, surprisingly vulnerable voice. "Les Coeurs..." is in fact that rarest of commodities: a song worth buying an entire LP for.

Grade B -

Tim Marsh
Riff Raff
April, 1992

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!