Jim Carroll Band
Best Of: A World Without Gravity (Rhino)
by Marc Hirsh
Jim Carroll Band
Best Of: A World Without Gravity (Rhino)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in the Public News, May 17, 1995
Poet though he may be, Jim Carroll is no rock 'n' roll singer, and he never should have tried. In fact, I'm not even sure he tried. Throughout Gravity, he whines his way tunelessly through 18 songs performed by various incarnations of the Jim Carroll Band from 1979-1985, and when he makes an effort to actually hit notes rather than just talk his way through the songs, the results, in songs like "Day and Night" and "Love Crimes," can be fairly painful.
And yet. Although there is more Jim Carroll here than anyone has a right to want, a lot of it really is fascinating. There's the guided rant of "People Who Died," of course, but there's also the excellent "Catholic Boy" and the rather harrowing "Lorraine," an astonishing example of music and words feeding off one another to create a huge beast of a song that feels like it could cause serious damage on the slightest provocation.
If Carroll can't sing worth a damn, his band(s) can at least play. The backing group has a pretty good take on punk and pop styles and often masks Carroll's vocal inadequacies. The first band, the one that made the excellent Catholic Boy album, was the tightest, but the others have their moments.
Carroll's lyrics are really the centerpiece of the album, though. The man probably shouldn't have been given a microphone, but he could write up a storm, as a glance at the lyric sheet (skipping Lenny Kaye's pointless ramblings) will demonstrate. It's actually not that surprising that Carroll should want to get into rock 'n' roll. His poetry was something like the literary equivalent of punk, and it wasn't that great a step for him to get into a band. It's really only when he went for the more immediate and obvious, such as "(No More) Luxuries," that his words are anything less than powerful.
Why Rhino chose to make a too-long compilation and didn't just rerelease Catholic Boy with notable later cuts as bonus tracks is a bit of a mystery. Maybe they were afraid that focusing on that album would suggest that Carroll burned out early (although seven of the compilation's songs are from that period). Maybe they wanted to portray him an overlooked major artist. If so, they'd be wrong. He was just a man with a talent for poetry and a passion for music. This album chronicles the latter and shows that passion won't get you everything. But it can come close.