I Hare You Rockin'

The Dave Edmunds Band

Columbia

I N HIS LATEST LIVE RELEASE, I Hear You Rockin,' British rocker Dave Edmunds performs an almost unimaginable feat. Here, the former member of Rockpile gets away with covering both Elvises, Presley and Costello, on the same side of the same album. Rather than taking the advice of another famous rocker, whose trademark is "Cover me," Edmunds has here adopted as his motto, "Cover everyone."

Actually, such an attitude is typical of Edmunds who, for twenty years, has sought to become Britain's leading rock revivalist while modestly updating his sound to fit the times. In the late 1970s, he souped up his version of 1950s American rockabilly and became a leader of the "Angry Young Man" movement that made famous such British pub-rockers as Costello, Graham Parker, Joe Jackson and Nick Lowe. In the 1980s, he has even attempted, with varying degrees of success, to graft synthesizers onto his otherwise backward-looking music.

Now Columbia has released Rockin', in an effort not only to sum up all these facets of Edmunds' career, but to do so with a "live" recording, a la Bruce Springsteen, Edmunds' labelmate and fellow retro-rocker. Of course, since Edmunds is a lesser star, Columbia has allotted him only one disc instead of five to encapsulate his long career, but surely the idea is the same.

Amazingly, Rockin' does seem to contain most of the essential (and extremely danceable) Edmunds canon, from his first hit, "I Hear You Knocking"--hence the clever album title--to his hits with Rockpile (his acclaimed 1980 collaboration with Lowe) to his synthesizer era. As a result, there are few surprises on this album, in terms of its choice of songs and their journeyman renditions.

On Rockin', Edmunds does occasionally rev up his normally idling throttle with ferocious treatments of Parker's "Crawling From the Wreckage," Lowe's "I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)," and his own chestnut, "Ju Ju Man," all of which outstrip the originals. And even those fans accustomed to Edmunds' proclivity for non-originals will be pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of Juice Newton's "Queen of Hearts" and Dion and the Belmonts' "The Wanderer." With these songs and others, I Hear You Rockin' shows that you can judge a rocker by his covers.

Dreamtime

The Stranglers

Epic

DOES THE ALBUM COVER'S PICTURE of four tree-tressed tribesmen mean something? Do they and the primitive pictographs on the inner sleeve have anything to do with this album's music or lyrics? More important, does Dreamtime offer any reason to care?

Though they are veterans of the British punk explosion that created the Sex Pistols and the Clash, the Stranglers must have decided at some point that they wanted to become more than a punk band, a band that was primitively polyrhythmic yet urbanely artistic, sort of like Talking Heads. So they evolved from a punk band that was merely political into a Pop Band That Matters, a Band With A Statement To Make, all without even changing their lineup.

So what is Dreamtime's Statement? Beats me, The Songs are obviously about something: "Nice in Nice," "Too Precious," and the creatively titled "You'll Always Reap What you Show" are all clearly about materialism, for example. They don't actually comment on materialism; they are merely about materialism.

The best examples of this triumph of form over substance are "Big in America," just released as a single on a hamburger-shaped disc, and "Was It You?," which name-drops controversial topics as if in a shopping list. "The bullets and the hatred, was it you?/The famine and the genital disease, was it you?" is the strongest Statement the Stranglers can muster in this song--and on this album.

Dreamtime isn't that interesting musically, either. The Stranglers have the synthesized textures and technical polish of Ultravox or the Human League, but they lack those bands' ability to give their songs the pop melodies and hooks that keep listeners from forgetting the songs immediately after hearing them. In other words, most of this music is pleasant and unobtrusive enough to be perfectly in place in a dentist's office.

The Stranglers do manage to generate some interest in those songs augmented by a horn section, creating sound textures not usually heard in synth-pop. The best of these tunes is "Mayan Skies," an impressionistic little piece that is the album's least pretentious effort.

Still, it is hard to believe that the band that has to hire horns to make itself interesting is the same group that once recorded "Vietnamerica." Dreamtime tempts one to ask the Stranglers, "Was it you?"