No Subject

  Something about Jane Siberry's best music, like Yeats' ``Crazy
  Jane'' poems, makes me indescribably sad, which is probably good for
  my sense of balance. She stirs sweepingly romantic sentiments in
  with jarringly realistic questions: her admirable, highly
  theatrical, over-ambition makes Talk Talk, David Sylvian and The
  Blue Nile seem almost flippant. There's an intelligence at work
  which is something gauchely intrusive, sometimes as emotionally
  entralling as an early Sam Shephard play.
    ``When I Was A Boy'' is, like its title, so subtly powerful it
  makes me think of not only ``Map Of The Human Heart'' but my own
  childhood, something I never ever do (it takes a triumph of the will
  for me to recal *last week*). Like the very transcendent Kate Bush
  (a woman who can somehow exude mistique even on ``The Aspel Show''),
  Siberry mingles the gooey and the sinister, dreams and visions and
  rude awakenings, nostalgia and hope. The only genre this record
  could possibly be linked to is the island created on side two of
  Kate's ``Hounds Of Love''. Speaking voices, choral calls and
  responses, and loops of deranged background noise reel in and peel
  off in a vaguely comparable manner.
    Siberry's sixth album takes such introspective psycho-drama even
  further than her previous zenith, ``The Walking''. Brian Eno and
  Michael Brook make production contributions, but for once let's not
  give Eno *all* the credit for simply sitting in the same room as a
  genius, kd lang also guests on ``Calling All Angels'' (from a
  Wenders film), but this opus owes all all its sting and tremble to
  one inquisitive identity.
    ``_Did you ever think it'd be like this? / You and me running
  through the backstreets of the world like a pack of hounds or two /
  Wanting more and more love and how much is too much?_'' It ain't ``Be
  Bop A Lula'' but it's nobler and crueller. Another pearl (you have
  to hear it) is: ``_You're so thin / It's only a movie / Run Bambi
  run!_''.
    Jane's sinuous cinema shows six minutes of ``An Angel Stepped Down
  (And Slowly Turned Around)'', nine of ``The Vigil'', and seven of
  ``At The Beginning Of Time''. You get the big piture. Everything
  from mock rap to torrid viola glides cross-stage. ``_Come on, come
  on, come on / Let me into your temple._'' It aims higher than her
  native Toronto's CN Tower. On your knees boys *and* girls.

  Chris Roberts
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Ian Young  I.M.Young@bham.ac.uk  voice (work): +44 21 627 2000 x4521
Wolfson Computer Laboratory, University of Birmingham, B15 2TH, U.K.