Radio Silence
Boris Grebenshikov
1989: CBS/Columbia CK 44364
How I’ve failed to make any comments about this album on this page all these years eludes me, given that I’ve had Radio Silence since its LP release and then shortly afterwards on CD and that it is so obviously a culture-bridging hybrid effort involving some big players at a moment of intense sociopolitical development and change. Perhaps it’s a question of working out where to start and what the scope of the commentary needs to be to do it justice but not comment for the sake of commenting; I want to only note what I genuinely feel passionate about, here and elsewhere.
With that start, I’ll just toss aside the closing track, because to me it seems to utterly fail to reach a Western (that is, in the sense that culturally Russia sometimes isn’t quite part of The West although it’s not particularly Eastern) ear, aesthetically; never mind the language, “Китаи / China” is just slightly wince-inducing in its delivery, a mix of acoustic performance hampered by on the one hand overperformed intimate-but-strained vocals and on the other the application of echo effects.
As far as my favorite tracks go, those line up pretty easily: “The Postcard,” “Real Slow Today,” and “Radio Silence.” I like some of the others in part but none particularly overall. But is the respective listing order of those three cited tracks indicative of a ranking? Mmmmmmm…probably, although the latter two change positions from time to time depending on my mood when considering them. All three, however, share the unmistakable imprimatur of being a Dave Stewart production eliciting the best out of the available material *and* gaining Stewart’s own musical contribution as a musical artist.
“The Postcard” gets the top slot, in any case, because it’s simply the strongest and most concisely delivered rock track that is also a decent song with poetry for lyrics. Stewart gives it a beaut of a Eurythmics-driven pulse and spine but lets Grebenshikov sprawl and ooze and scenery-chew with his vocals because (presumably) that delivery would be completely natural for a Russian rock track sung in Russian and listened to by Russians whereas this is one sung in English for both sorts of ears (and others). The result is what on the Western side of the mix is probably the best of both worlds: we get to understand the sung lyrics rather than read translations that don’t do the lyrics justice, Grebenshikov gets to express his lyrics (albeit in a second language to him), and it all comes in a vehicle not merely driven but custom-built by Dave Stewart.
As for the title track, it’s just so readily enjoyable that it makes for a brilliant choice as the album opener. That the liner notes refer to this somewhat apologetically as “the rough mix” perhaps suggests that Stewart isn’t always sure (or the best judge) of where the pure/raw versus produced/too-rote line lies sometimes. It rushes and swoops along, spurting Stewart-style audio/musical flourishes left and right, to the very end (that end sequence’s repeated cycle of stereo-panning elements evoking in my own mind, perhaps unfortunately, an impression of a Muppets scene in which the repetition of a chasing motif gets reiterated until the Muppets in question fade into the background so a visual cut can occur.
And then there’s “Real Slow Today.” If Grebenshikov were a stronger singer, or if the lyrics were more powerful in English than these are, maybe this might have been an anthemic landmark; I don’t know how it landed in Russia back then or in related USSR countries. For me, this track is all about the ending sequence, the rest of it being “yeah-yeah-yeah, that’s nice, but what’s THIS part? The ending plays out over a minor-toned chord sequence that could easily resolve at its point of repetition but deliberately doesn’t do so, and the carnival rides whipping through it have only jazz-like riff resemblance to each other. It simmers and boils over, alternately, right to the end.
But what intrigued me most in that closing sequence, ever since I bought the LP, was what sounded like a bewitching distortion effect that (it seemed to me) might have been achieved by Lennox’s voice being vocorded or whatever onto Stewart’s guitar—a pairing that I don’t know them to ever have explicitly utilized but would be a natural offspring of their instruments in some sense. It sounded like Lennox was getting into the wailing and riffing for it, but the vocal sound seemed to be stretched beyond its natural capacity by being mapped to Stewart playing some parallel solo-guitar line that arched and rebounded gloriously over and over again.
Only later did I learn that Charlie Wilson (of the Gap Band) was a contributing vocalist on this album. That he was one on the following year’s Eurythmics album We Too Are One was a fact that retroactively informed my impression of what was happening on “Real Slow Today,” but even that knowledge didn’t quite explain or attribute the combined effect (which was a warbling/warping tenor descant of vocal gymnastics). So I still suspect there might have been some Stewart-manipulated effects happening in that end sequence.
Comments © 2018 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted, and no claim is made to the images and quoted lyrics.