Thursday, September 22, 2011

Bad Love, Randy Newman

Bad Love, Randy Newman (Dreamworks)
Randy Newman’s four decades of accomplishments are impressive: singer, songwriter, musician, composer of film scores, Academy Award nominee.

Arguably Newman’s forte is his uncanny ability to hone in on the idiosyncratic truths about people.

Bad Love beautifully showcases that ability.

Here he’s not penned songs so much as human tableaus that mercilessly hurl zingers at Homo sapiens.

Yet his messages are palatable thanks to his uproarious humor and biting wit.

Edgy guitar licks set the tone for I’m Dead (But I Don’t Know It), an hilarious song about rock stars long past their prime.

In The World Isn’t Fair, the narrator imagines a conversation with Karl Marx.

To Marx, unfairness means social, economic and political inequality. To the narrator, it means not having a trophy wife like his middle-aged peers do.

Forget dialectical materialism; arm candy rules.

The disc’s standout track is Shame, a screamingly funny tune about an ill-fated May-December romance.

The older male narrator grapples with his baser desires while unsuccessfully fending off his female-voiced conscience.

Bad love, indeed.


--Heidi Johnson-Wright

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