Band
Northern Lights, Southern Cross
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Cahoots and the oldies LP, Moondog Matinee, weren't exactly auspicious developments in a recording career with beginnings as brilliant as the Band's. Their playing behind Bob Dylan on Planet Waves and Before the Flood as well as on the earlier Basement Tapes has been more accomplished and stirring than any of their own music since The Band, and it is against these efforts as sidemen that their first album of new songs in four years must inevitably be judged. The first few seconds of Northern Lights—Southern Cross promise a departure. Robbie Robertson's usually clean, cutting guitar quavers through a wah-wah and phase-shifter, and Garth
Read More Hudson is using multiple synthesizers to create an orchestra-like overlay. The entrance of Levon Helm's voice, its Arkansas inflection intact, provides a familiar reference, but only momentarily. The vocals on earlier Band albums tended to blur into murkily homogenous instrumental backdrops, but here Levon and the answering voices of Richard Manuel and Rick Danko are mixed forward, ringing through loud and clear. The listener realizes during the first few bars of music the extent to which the antique sepia-tinged flavor of the first Band albums was a result of their determinedly primitive mixes. Before long it's equally evident that the Band's new sound is the result of a revolution in instrumental and recording technology and not of a revolution in ideas. Robertson's new songs are set in his native north country, from the "smoky bars and souped up cars" that comprised the Canadian landscape of his youth to the porn theaters of Times Square, New York, and for the most part they attempt to render emotion directly rather than through the medium of characters. Unfortunately, the self-dramatization and occasional baldness which marred the more personal songs on Cahoots are still present. "It Makes No Difference" wallows in emotional excess ("Since you've gone it's a losin' battle/Stampedin' cattle they rattle the walls") and the down-and-out narrator of "Forbidden Fruit" wonders, as he wanders past the sleaze palaces of 42nd Street, "... is this part of man's evolution/To be torn between truth and illusion?" Several other songs are so introverted they're almost antiexpressive. "Hobo Jungle" may be more than an account of the death and funeral of a drifter, but the significance of the words to their author isn't made clear. "Rags and Bones," which ends the album, consists of an obsessive catalog of urban sights and sounds with only a passing evocation of déjà vu to indicate what they mean to Robertson or are supposed to mean to the listener. In "Jupiter Hollow," an apparent dream journey into states of mental dissociation, Robertson notes matter-of-factly, without seeming to complain, that "nobody cares when a man goes mad/And tries to free the ghost within." Even "Ophelia" and "Ring Your Bell," both relatively lightweight sagas of moun
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