WHITE MUSIC

I'll start out by saying that I get the overall lack of enthusiasm for this platter, but I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with my fellow Crack Addicts on its place in the pantheon. Of course I can't lift this one to the lofty heights of any of its predecessors, but White Music's embrace of stark new wave and its totally eighties concerns with the state of pop radio, wasteful American consumption, and of course - the Russians, always fills me with some kind of weird cold-war era spiked mixture of nostalgia and wistful admiration. White Music is less a CTS album proper, than a John Palumbo solo album employing two of his of his old CTS cohorts, suitably paranoid synth-ster Vince DePaul and the stinging guitar of Rick Witkowski, who also produces here. Another thing White Music has going for it, is that its got several of Palumbo's best pure rock songs - sly opener "Poptown," the sinister, pulsing hard rock and nasty social commentary of "White Music," and desperate ballad "Hot Razors In My Heart" which eschews Palumbo's normal world-weary cynicism and just goes for a pure radio single - and scores well enough to get maybe the last significant bit of national radio play CTS ever got. As a whole, White Music is definitely a bit front-loaded, and stops being effortless right around the blatant, somewhat tasteless jealous cuckoldry of "Suspicion", maybe finally getting too clever by half with hamfisted "The Techni Generation," and ending in delusions of MOR grandeur in "Songs of Soviet Sons," presaging Sting's ponderous synth-orchestrated Russo-pretension by a good five years. Flaws duly noted, as a piece I think it is fair to say the album has more depth of arrangement and ambition than any of the CTS records that followed up until 2002's Ghosts. A serviceable soundtrack to Palumbo's still-sharp pen, it deserves a little more respect, even if it certainly isn't prog, more like a stripped-down version of the hard rock aspects of the seventies lineup. Maybe in retrospect it also encapsulates and presages the bad habits of the long lost decade to follow, a decade that would finally bury CTS in the bargain bins of the rock kingdom for good (outside of Dundalk, that is).