Living Colour
(Megaforce)
They say that you can't tell a book from its cover, but that's just a hoary old homily our grandparent's grandparents came up with to try and teach us something about rushing to judgment...or else it's an indictment of contemporary education, I'm not really sure which. But in our modern society, marketing has taught us that the cover is the book, or at least a reasonable facsimile of such, and we all know since childhood that the cookie portrayed on the front of the package has little to do with the vaguely chocolate-flavored crumbs that we'll pick out of the box and shove into our greedy little maws while sitting mindlessly in front of the TV set.
But I digress... honestly, you shouldn't judge the first album in five years from the reunited Living Colour from its amazingly ugly CD cover. Chosen from among thousands of entries by the band's fans across the globe, there's nothing about the cover artwork here that would leave one to believe that this is a slammin' new batch o' tunes from one of the most innovative and influential bands of the early ‘90s. Heck, there's nothing here that wouldn't be mistaken for some bad video game software, much less scream "rock 'n' roll!" at the top of its leather-plated lungs. 'Tis more the shame, too, 'cause The Chair In The Doorway is an album that deserves to be discovered by the hard rock/heavy metal hungry masses that have embraced the likes of Nickelback to get their cheap thrills.
Whether it was a change in musical trends, or the waning of their creative juices, Living Colour's brilliant late ‘80s shooting stardom flamed out after the release of 1993's Stain, which was seen as somewhat of a letdown after the blinding white light/white heat of the band's 1988 debut, Vivid and its 1990 follow-up, Time's Up. The band went on hiatus for the better part of the decade, reuniting in 2000 and hitting the music biz treadmill again in '03 with the critically-acclaimed, commercially-ignored CollideØscope, and they have subsided mostly on live gigs and live albums in the years since.
Although The Chair in the Doorway may not reverse Living Colour's unfortunate commercial fortunes, the guys certainly have nothing to hang their collective heads in shame over, either. Carefully-crafted over the past half-decade, the album provides a nice balance of sly funk-metal and lyrical bombast, the band filling the grooves with plenty of creative rhythms and exciting fretwork.
Corey Glover's voice is a bit more ragged than it was 20 years ago, but he's still capable of both a soulful metallic croon and a roughneck howl. Bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun comprise one of the best rhythm sections in contemporary music, period, with Wimbish's basswork vibrating out of the mix while Calhoun's tub-thumping ranges from subtle, seductive brushwork to devastating blasts of furious energy. As for guitarist Vernon Reid, I've loved every note the guy has cranked out since I first saw him perform back in '87, and in my mind he's one of the most underrated, and madly imaginative guitarists of the past 20 years.
What can the longtime, never-say-die Living Colour fan expect from The Chair in the Doorway? Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The band continues to grow in subtle and sometimes strange ways - heck, the engaging "That's What You Taught Me" could easily pass for a mainstream hard rock tune with Reid's conventional soloing, Glover's passionate vox, and a radio-ready rhythmic backdrop. But the adventurous "Burned Bridges" throws a few more studio tricks into the mix, with oscillating fretwork and subdued-but-powerful vocals underpinned by a driving backbeat.
"The Chair" is the album's monster track, with a dangerous slamdance groove met headfirst with spacey, reckless, anarchic guitarwork and fierce vocals. The obligatory throwback tune here may be "DecaDance," the song invoking memories of Time's Up era jams with its Godzilla-sized rhythm and barbed wire solos, but "Heads Up" could be a Vivid outtake, with plodding dino-stomp rhythms and plenty of socially-conscious moxie mucking up the grooves.
Time and trends may have passed Living Colour by, but that doesn't mean that the band can't still create vital, exciting, balls-to-the-wall hard rock 'n' roll as they have with The Chair in the Doorway. Although they don't sound nearly as innovative as they did in 1988, they're certainly more musically subversive. Forget about the cover, it's what's inside that counts...and in this case, there's plenty for everybody to enjoy.
Standout Tracks: "Burned Bridges," "Hard Times," "Not Tomorrow" REV. KEITH A. GORDON
