Consumer Guide Album

Marianne Faithfull: Blazing Away [Island, 1990]
Already too damn significant for her own good, the diva-elect displays herself and her tattered repertoire to an adoring St. Anne's claque and gets little help from a band that should know better. I could go back to the disastrous video (shots of microphone bases for variety, pans of stained-glass windows for edification, slo-mo birds for filmpoetry) to make sure that's partner-in-cultdom Barry Reynolds on guitar overkill, not wizard-for-hire Marc Ribot. But since it's definitely Ribot's pal Dougie Bowne laying on the drumrolls, I'd rather not know. Either way the misbegotten strategy is to ratchet up the melodrama until only a cad would deny's she's suffering--and not just because she's worried sick about having to pull this act off forever amen. B-