Glad Music

Album review

As the homage to A Hard Day's Night on its cover makes clear, 1986's Glad Music is R. Stevie Moore's attempt at making a straightforward pop album, or at least as close to straightforward as this Nashville-born, New Jersey-based quirk pop innovator is capable of getting. And on its own idiosyncratic terms, Glad Music succeeds brilliantly. After nearly two decades of compiling lo-fi four-track bedroom recordings for his self-released cassettes, Glad Music is the first album Moore recorded in a proper studio. The difference is startling. Given a whopping 16 tracks, Moore adds subtle and inventive touches like the snippets of backwards tape that color the throbbing "Don't Let Me Go to the Dogs" and the four-beat electronic tom-tom fill that becomes a key hook in the amazingly catchy "Part of the Problem," besides self-overdubbing some richly delicate harmonies, like a one-man Beach Boys, on the achingly pretty acoustic opener "Norway." And the songs themselves are just outstanding. Besides the abovementioned tunes, three of Moore's all-time greats, Glad Music includes the Kinks-like "I Like to Stay Home," the smart-alecky power popper "Why Should I Love You" and the positively giddy "Shakin' in the Sixties," a tongue-in-cheek ode to the aesthetic Austin Powers would later claim. Perhaps the album's best-known track is the dreamy "Colliding Circles," an original song with a title cribbed from what was at the time thought to be a legendary lost Beatles outtake. Of course, Glad Music is an R. Stevie Moore album, so it has its share of oddities, including the Chipmunks-go-Ramones "He's Nuts" and a quirky trio of covers, including the Association's "Along Comes Mary," a surprisingly straight overdubbed a cappella version of the traditional gospel tune "I Wouldn't Mind Dyin'," and Floyd Tillman's country weeper "I Love You So Much It Hurts" (performed with an almost venomous satirical edge). All four tracks are funny and listenable interludes on an album that otherwise mostly plays by the pop rules. Glad Music is R. Stevie Moore at his most accessible.
© Stewart Mason /TiVo