Brown was, of course, a member of cultavant-garde band Tuxedomoon, the San Francisco collective that pulledup stakes and moved to Belgium in the mid-1980s. Last year LTM reissueda couple of albums by fellow Tuxedomoon alumnus Blaine L. Reininger,and it's actually a little weird how similar Brown and Reininger's solomaterial sounds, especially considering how little it resembles theirwork in Tuxedomoon. For their solo projects, both artists developed adistinctly MOR style of urbane, jazzy pop music with literate,world-weary lyrics. Luckily, Blaine L. Reininger's albums were saved byhis prodigious talent on strings and his use of neo-baroque chamberquartet orchestrations. Steven Brown has no such saving grace however,and 1991's Half Out,his third solo album, suffers from "adult contemporary" blandness andan annoyingly overcomplicated production style. Each track is filledout with loads of superfluous compositional elements: keyboards, horns,emulators, synthesizers, strings, drum programming, accordion, guitarsand backup vocals. It's all a bit exhausting, making relatively minimaltracks like the point-counterpoint "Violorganni" (a duet withReininger) a welcome respite. For the majority of the album (and thefour extraneous bonus tracks), Brown's music seems over-calculated andpseudo-sophisticated, from the tiresome opening monologue ("I've got amillion things to say but I forgot. I could write a book but I lost mypen."), to the ill-advised Cole Porter cover ("In the Still of theNight"). In an effort to prove how intellectual and literate he is,Brown name drops Jean Cocteau, randomly breaks into French and Italian,and spins some incomprehensible yarn involving "Willy Loman with hisFlemish Reader's Digest." Frankly, it's all a bit pompous, a collectionof empty artistic gestures that don't seem terribly substantive. Iseriously doubt I'll be giving Half Out another spin any time in the near future. samples:
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