Marianne Faithfull's 'Kissing Time'...
With it's remarkable, hypnotic, hard-rock chant of a title cut, the heavily promoted single Sex With Strangers sung (or very nearly spoken) in her trademark sultry contralto, and all the other tracks in between, Kissin' Time, Marianne Faithfull's 9th studio album since Broken English, sets a new benchmark and proves once again that as an artist, she is strongest within the element of surprise.
The album's opening track, Sex With Strangers, a collaboration with Beck as co-writer and producer, finds Faithfull breathily taking smooth center stage over a clipped techno-funk back beat. And when track two, The Pleasure Song, kicks in with a synthesized percolating bass groove, you might think that this is going to be just another techno relic of an album; but then, the cut morphs into solid rock, with conventional drums kicking in over all the electronica. At 55, Faithfull is no stranger to rock, and throughout the course of this disc she defines it as her own.
Don't look for extreme vocal miracles here, but do take time to savor the small ones; Faithfull tends to reserve her strongest, bring-the-house-down vocalization for her memorable live performances. As limited as her pipes may sometimes seem after years on the edge, she nonetheless displays an impressive, expressive emotional range, which varies in emphasis from album to album, song to song. Overall, her primary vocal range encompasses the better part of three octaves, and on Kissin' Time as with Vagabond Ways and Strange Weather, she tends to stray toward the lower end. Here, the singing is generally straightforward and unaffected, sometimes almost conversational. On I'm On Fire, which she co-wrote with Billy Corgan, the wall of noise production puts the singer's vocal style nearly in the background, but not to disadvantage. Whereas on 1995's A Secret Life (as on Broken English), she captured the full value of her unusual voice as a true musical instrument, she's not as preoccupied with it here. And that's ok. Because Billy Corgan's Wherever I Go reads as sweetly as anything she's recorded in recent memory, and Song For Nico is sung clearly --- rich and round with passion. In her tribute to the late singer, she briefly chronicles the 1960's decadence of Warhol and Délon. The chorus, "Yesterday is gone, there's just today, no tomorrow; Yesterday is gone, there's just today, no more," is an immediate, haunting hook.
Her musical genius surfaces again in Love and Money. Now this IS a toe-tapping ditty, which bounces along like nothing else I've heard before. Part '60's bar room go-go funk, with a bass and guitar to match, and part love song, the lyric is a series of questions answered by her persistent "Uh-huh", and separated by an effectively short bridge before coming all-too soon to a close.
Nobody's Fault, a cover of a Beck tune, finds Faithfull in the context of an epic rock ballad, and purely at home. But it's the closing cut, the title song Kissin' Time, in which the sheer power of this album becomes crystallized. With it's opening bass line, slightly fuzzed, which builds into drums, handclaps, guitar power chords and ghostly spontaneous background chants before it even reaches the full chorus, the tune is an easy contender for song of the year on many lists. I've tested the cut on several people I'd generally consider ambivalent about Marianne Faithfull's music, and the enthusiastic reaction is nearly universal.
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DFA Records: Holiday Mix 2005
THE ROLLING STONES at Staples Center, October 31, and at Edison Field, November ...
