Consumer Guide Album

Dory Previn: Mary C. Brown and the Hollywood Sign [United Artists, 1973]
Previn doesn't just belabor a cliche, she flails it with barbed wire, and she never writes about a concrete situation when with extra words she can falsify it via abstraction. A feminist friend once persuaded me that such transparent pretension can only signal pain and bewilderment, but if I found a cat trapped in a washing machine, I wouldn't set up a recording studio there--I'd just open the door. D