Consumer Guide Album

Laurie Anderson: The Ugly One With the Jewels and Other Stories [Warner Bros., 1995]
The difference isn't between "spoken word" and "music." The difference is that this is stories and the dull Bright Red is songs--and that right now she can better justify her obsession with the limits of American sense by telling about her travels than by devising metaphors for her displacement. Anyway, Bright Red's music retreats so far downtown from Strange Angels that it's reprised (minimally, of course) in the portentous swells and eerie punctuation employed so effectively on this album--which showcases her most striking musical talent, for recitative, even if the clipped phrases and drawn-out final consonants do get predictable. Not something you'll play a lot. But broadening. B+