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The Kirsty MacColl web site
INTERVIEW
This is an obituary/ review of Tropical Brainstorm
The last LP by the unforgettable
Kirsty MacColl
by JIM FARBER
If it had happened in one of her songs, we would have laughed at the absurdity of it. Kirsty MacColl's death at the age of 41, which occurred when a pleasure boat struck her as she swam in the Gulf Coast last November, had all the morbid surprise of MacColl's own lyrics.
As pop's answer to Dorothy Parker, MacColl wrote about love's awful happenstances and life's tragic whims, leavening her pessimism with a desert-dry wit and an underlying faith that together made her one of music's most honest scribes.
"Don't be too hard on my cold, cold heart," she once sang. "It's all I've got left to me now/I fell out of favor with heaven somewhere/And I'm here for the hell of it now."
If couplets like this earned MacColl a reputation for being cynical, she once told me she hardly thought the term was appropriate. "I'm not cynical," she deadpanned. "I'm just very, very careful."
MacColl showed that care in the craft of her melodies and the shading of her vocals. Frequently, she sang in two voices: a low, jaded lead vocal communicating disappointment, and a faint, innocent backup vocal that hinted she retained a sliver of belief.
Since the start of her musical career in 1979, the singer-songwriter put out five terrific albums, racked up a few hits in her native England and collaborated with, or wrote for, everyone from the Smiths' Johnny Marr and the Talking Heads to Bette Midler. Her sole U.S. hit was sung by someone else: Tracey Ullman shot MacColl's Lesley Gore-like They Don't Know up the charts in 1984.
MacColl could write in any style: Brit-pop, samba, American country, you name it. But her last obsessions were with the music of Cuba and Brazil, which is reflected on her final release, Tropical Brainstorm. Thankfully, it has just been issued here after coming out in Europe last spring.
It's an album you should buy this instant.
The music is a thoroughly original amalgam of Latin beats and English humor. Sensitive to accusations of cultural poaching, MacColl made sure to make the music's fruity horns and swaying rhythms very much her own. In fact, the eroticism of Latin music presents a wry and painful counterpoint to MacColl's words, which find her frequently sex-starved.
In the new Autumngirlsoup, traveling to warm places becomes a metaphor for erotic satisfaction. On the one hand, she's resigned to her damp English home: "On a cold gray day/A cold gray man will do." On the other hand, she pines for "A long dark night" where "a long dark man might do."
In England 2 Colombia 0, MacColl compares her love life to a soccer match in which she identifies with the losing team. On Here Comes That Man Again, she has guilty sex with a Dutch pornographer over the Internet. On Celestine, she treats her sexual feelings as a demonic possession: "a wild and wicked slut that lives inside my head."
In her tireless pursuit of originality, MacColl even has a song where she becomes a stalker to one of her own fans.
The music in all these songs owes as much to the campier elements of Latin music as the sensual ones. MacColl goes the full Ricky Ricardo route for In These Shoes, which is about a vain woman who turns up her nose at spontaneous sex to protect her footwear.
It's great to hear such wild musings from a middle-aged divorcee and mother of two (by ex-husband/famed producer Steve Lillywhite).
If you're unexposed to the yearning ways of MacColl, you owe it to yourself to use Tropical Brainstorm as your jumping-off point. You should also chase down the wonderfully titled Electric Landlady for songs like the class-conscious club cut Walking Down Madison, and Galore, for her especially withering version of Morrissey's You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby", and Titanic Days, for her sympathetic song about a serial murderer (I Can't Stop Killing You). And then there's her masterpiece, Kite, which shows an artist in full command of language, music, instrumentation and, most of all, herself.
No one in modern pop has written songs with more life in them. And that life will not die.
E-mail: jfarber@edit.nydailynews.com
Thanks to DA for the link (all contributors are listed on the credits page by the way, just click on the "I like Kirsty" badge on the main page... in case you were wondering)
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