Randy Newman and the members of Jane's Addiction would probably be the first to tell you that they don't have anything in common, that they don't listen to each other's music, that they shouldn't be in the same record review. And that's probably true: Newman, forty-four and unprolific, makes immaculate pop music, with a lushness borrowed
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from movie soundtracks; Jane's Addiction, young and restless, makes music that scrapes against the smooth surfaces of commercial pop. But these perverse, willful, Los Angeles-bred artists paint their very different pictures with similarly vivid strokes: both
Nothing's Shocking and
Land of Dreams are populated by recognizable, real people, even if they're people who aren't likely to end up at the same party.
Jane's Addiction is the latest great hope of the Los Angeles club scene, a product of a city whose often overlooked hard-rock scene has long been every bit as successful and commercially productive as its more heralded punk and postpunk scene. Jane's Addiction straddles the line between the two camps, and several others: the band is indulgent and excessive, adept at typically screeching (but atypically original) hard-rock guitar raveups and at flights into dreamy psychedelia. A classic "love 'em or hate 'em" outfit, the band is great, and it is also full of shit – often at the same time, a dichotomy that may be the edge that sustains Nothing's Shocking.
When Perry Farrell, lyricist and lead singer, offers us his views on, say, pervasive media violence (in the psychodrama "Ted, Just Admit It") or the social order (in the horn-spiked "Idiots Rule"), he doesn't have much to say that's terribly new. But when he tells us where he is coming from, Jane's Addiction is at its disturbing best: "Had a Dad" and "Standing in the Shower ... Thinking," for example, are hard-boiled riff rockers, unsettling, lyrically incisive and musically excessive. Best of all is "Jane Says," a holdover from the rawer and more abrasive independent album that the band released last year; from the strummed acoustic guitar that carries it along to the song's acid-etched portrait of an addict, the song is a worthy Left Coast successor to "Walk on the Wild Side."
But another comparison is even more instructive, and just as flattering. Forget about clones like Kingdom Come and Whitesnake: as much as any band in existence, Jane's Addiction is the true heir to Led Zeppelin, creating music that's simultaneously forbidding and weighty, delicate and ethereal. But it's never – well, hardly ever – slavishly imitative, and Jane's Addiction's version of Zeppelin is stripped of Robert Plant's fairy-tale whimsy: even when the sound is contemplative and plaintive, the sensibility is hardheaded and realistic.
You could say something similar about the sensibility of Randy Newman's Land of Dreams. Newman has spent much of his career animating and hiding behind disagreeable characters: th
