SPRING ALBUM ROUNDUP : LYDON VENTS SPLEEN

“ALBUM.” Public Image Ltd. Elektra.

On the evidence of this album, John Lydon has resigned himself to the fact that there’s no getting around the traditional musical vocabulary; much as he professed to despise it, he was simply incapable of inventing a new one.

Featuring a cast of slick hired guns, this is Lydon’s most musical album to date. While the sound of his music has matured into an exotic bloom, the content of his work remains stalled in first gear and he continues to vent his spleen with the haughty peevishness of deposed royalty. That Lydon is a nifty wordsmith remains unchanged as well; here we find him constructing a rhyme around the words “cranial abatoirre.” Not bad!

The album’s first single, “Rise,” a call to arms built on an ascending line of chiming chords, is as close as we’re likely to get to a message of hope from Lydon, but even this glimmer of optimism is couched in a firm belief in the boundless evil of the human soul. It’s unlikely that Lydon will ever cease to wag the accusatory finger at all us sinners, and considering how witty he is in interviews, he delivers this message with a surprising lack of humor.

The album concludes with a poorly reasoned tune called “Round,” which finds John demanding to know, “How many of you have seen a factory?!!” Lydon, of course, lives in Venice Beach and I think we can safely assume he’s not moonlighting at a factory job. A more interesting point is what the lyric says about Lydon’s presumptions about his audience. How does he know factory workers aren’t buying his records? He knows they’re not because of the fact that he isn’t interested in making music for factory workers, preferring instead to sneer at the spoiled children of the world.