Artist: Living Colour
Label: MegaForce Records
Release: 2009
Rating: 4.5/5
Living Colour are the kings of funk metal groove. Underrated kings from the late eighties. The handful of die-hard Slovenes among you who have managed to dig deeper into the band know that it’s made up of four top-notch, endlessly versatile musicians with jazz running through their veins. And when those same guys aren’t stretched across various experimental projects where they enjoy total creative freedom, they are Living Colour! A band that never landed the big break at the end of the eighties, so most people know them only for the big hit Cult Of Perosnality, unlike similar experimenters of the time who did break through, and who, next to Living Colour, were pioneers in more than a few respects, à la Jane’s Addiction and Fate No More. Now they’re back with only their fifth studio album. “Kaleidoscope” from 2003 was a great record, a lot “softer” than the ferocious “Stain” (1993), which was ten years older, but at the same time it flirted in many ways with avant-garde experimentalism, which is perfectly understandable given the four names in the Living Colour lineup, and which gave that album a special place in their career.
“The Chair In The Doorway”, unlike “Kaleidoscope”, comes at you with a much more fluid manner, easier on the ears. So it’s a far easier album, in the sense that it doesn’t matter when you spin it. At a funeral or during great sex. It fits every moment and doesn’t demand the listener’s full concentration the way “Kaleidoscope” did. Add the fact that “The Chair In The Doorway” is nowhere near as hammering as the angry “Stain” (1993), and that the songs are mostly seriously quick to win you over, all with the band’s usual dynamic ups and downs, and Living Colour come close to their beginnings with “Vivid” (1988) and “Time’s Up” (1990). Of course, “The Chair In The Doorway” is its own story, and what really sounds good is the production, which is alive and organic and feels like Living Colour recorded the album all together in the studio, playing the material together as if they were up on stage at a gig.
If we stick only to the more compact and straightforward songs that work like potential hits, which has always been a defining trait of the band’s expressive power, as captured in Behind The Sun and Blese Those (with a bare-bones minimalist yet wickedly witty back-and-forth walk up and down the scale across the chords A-C-D), then Hard Way (bluesy connotations, in that typically cynical, smart-ass manner, once again commanded by Glover’s witty verses) and That’s What You Taught Me, it’s not hard to conclude that Living Colour went in with a measure of self-control, which demanded that they deliver an album that’s pleasing and easier to get into for the wider masses. So the new album is the band’s shot at getting back to more prominent spots on the best-selling album charts. We’ll see.
And yet… The first part of the album, which opens with the hammering Burned Bridges and The Chair, has a nice dose of experimental extravagance, with Vernon Reid as the main player in his typical solo outbursts. The song Dekadence is marked by a poisonously rolling riff-rolling, which brings a moment of heavier metal-ness to the album. Once again it’s got that familiar spirit of rebellion and mockery, as the band once more fearlessly flips its (middle) finger at the stench of yuppies, who are scared to death that the first bacterium creeping past will kill them! Living Colour stay solid and unshakable in their sermon, and that keeps them forever young, sparkling and downright attractive in every single moment!
The song that gets your feet moving is Young Man. This is where Living Colour are strongest at fusing metal with seductive funk rhythmic grooves. Pay attention to the contrast between the funk rhythm, with its added percussion undercurrent, the metal riff and an all-in Glover, who in expressive fury strings together some seriously thrilling parallels of true apocalyptic skepticism. Next comes the highly atmospheric, mid-tempo Method, where the band builds an incredibly massive curtain of background wall of sound, marked by Vernon’s sporadic avalanches of riffs set against the counterweight of Glover’s unbelievable vocal power. In Method, Glover is mysterious, tragic, without a shred of humor, utterly merciless. This song will go down well with all the Faith No More fans too!
The first part of the album, which holds a bit more experimental extravagance without tipping the scales away from easy listening, is followed, on a conveyor belt, by the potential hits mentioned in one of the paragraphs above. That creates a contrasting feeling that “The Chair In The Doorway” is actually an album in two parts. The first, more open to musical experiments yet sworn to that quintessential Living Colour fusion of funk and metal, and the second, where the guys ease off the gas a little and line up songs of higher melodicism and the seductiveness of a quick hit on the listener. The hammering element is kept in this part too, thanks to a song like Hard Time. That’s What You Taught Me is a classic Living Colour trick. Simple, melodic, with stripped-down figures, but what gives it expressive power and puts it on equal footing with the other songs is Glover’s superb approach, where the singer shines with an exceptional knack for pulling off (undemanding for Living Colour, yet demanded) twists of vocal improvisation. It’s Glover who rescues the “simpler” moments of the album so that they work on par with the other, “more expressively profound” songs, and are authentic and real in every way.
Interestingly, after the impressively furious Out Of My Mind, where Glover, through bestial outbursts of rage, wrestles with the fact of selling your soul to the devil, the album doesn’t close with Not Tomorrow in the intense manner typical of the rest of the record. Not Tomorrow is the second song with a blues moment. An interesting feint, sure, but maybe it would have been better if Out Of My Mind and Not Tomorrow had swapped places in the tracklist of “The Chair In The Doorway”. Luckily there’s a “hidden” song, Asshole, where the guys borrow a generic rock n’ roll trick that, once again, works brilliantly within Living Colour’s philosophy of fusion, conjuring up at the end that feeling that drives you to spin “The Chair In The Doorway” again and again!
“The Chair In The Doorway” is an album that feels seriously relaxed, unforced, and at the same time armed with that one-of-a-kind Living Colour inimitability of musical extravagance. As mentioned, it’s an easier-access album that gets under your skin after just two or three spins in the CD player. It carries moments of typical experimental value, measured and controlled so the album doesn’t slip out of the reins of high ear-friendliness, as well as those moments that give the band the potential to take the charts again. True, it’s not the early nineties anymore, but “The Chair In The Doorway” is another album that won’t give you any trouble at all if you’re after an energetic counterpart to “Vivid” as well as a look at the band’s forward development. That last bit is the assurance that brings winning points to “The Chair In The Doorway” too. So this is an album that you fans of the band will be hugely happy with! Living Colour stay their own men, headstrong, uniquely inspired, with the look of an unstoppable rebellious spark of devilish arrogance that keeps them forever young, attractive and, in every moment, musically avant-garde to the core.
Lineup
Corey Glover – vocals
Vernon Reid – guitar
Doug Wimbish – bass
William E. Calhoun – drums
Tracklist
01. Burned Bridges
02. The Chair
03. Decadance
04. Young Man
05. Method
06. Behind The Sun
07. Bless Those (Little Annie’s Prayer)
08. Hard Times
09. That’s What You Taught Me
10. Out Of My Mnd
11. Not Tomorrow
12. Asshole (Hidden Track)
