Consumer Guide Album

Art Bears: Hopes and Fears [Random Radar, 1978]
Despite rock instrumentation from Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, and friends and the rousing Who quote that kicks the best original song into high, this music is either consciously antipopular or "serious" with pretensions to accessibility. In either case it's Art--political Art, I know. The problem is, I don't get as much out of it as I do out of, say, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, or at least Bertolt Brecht and Hans Eisler, whose "On Suicide" announces the band's intent. Despite Dagmar's self-indulgent austerity, the stark, atonal music is often compelling, but while the lyrics are never stupid, they do depend on intellectual commonplaces--labyrinth imagery, reference to Greek myth, and other roundabout ways of saying not much. "In Two Minds," about a teenager's schizophrenia, is a commonplace too, but an illuminated one. And the envoi to Piers Plowman is a touch I like. B