Pick of the Season

By JAY COCKS

An informal consumer guide to current rock and pop

Check them out, tune them in, slip them on, let them spin. Herewith, a spring garland of rock and pop, with a few sprigs of hemlock for good measure.

Public Image Ltd.: Second Edition (Island/Warner Bros.). The weather forecast on the far frontiers of rock is a little cold and spooky, if this record is any indication. Alternately rigorous and unhinged, steam-heated and strangulated, Second Edition is the collective work of the band John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) formed when he broke with the Sex Pistols. The Pistols' music was like a mugging; Public Image's is like a football match in purgatory. Using repeated chords, shattered rhythms and lyrics that sound like electrocuted William Burroughs ("Spreading tales/ Like coffin nails/ Is this living"), Public Image puts on a kind of psychic garage sale whose object is to bankrupt conventional rock. "Wouldn't waste the effort on entertainment," Lydon sings in Chant, and the band plays by that rule for four adventurous sides.

Lou Reed: Growing Up in Public (Arista). Wherever Lydon and all other assorted punks, new wavers and no wavers may have come from, no matter where they are all headed, Lou Reed has already been there. Public Image owes a debt to the saber-toothed experiments of Reed's late '60s band, the Velvet Underground, and Reed still remains several furlongs ahead of anyone in laying down jagged fragments of autobiography that cut like pieces of a shattered mirror. Growing Up in Public is a collection of primal assaults and tentative love songs that all together are like a return ticket from a voyage to the end of the night.

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band:

Against the Wind (Capitol). Out a few weeks, and a thorough smash, this album is a collection of loose-limbed rockers and high-reaching ballads. Every cut has its eye fixed on the top of the charts with such calculation and skill that listening to the whole record straight through is like being held for ransom at WKRP. Seger is a topflight regional rocker out of Detroit, but this time around he is sticking to formula so rigidly that he has started to rewrite himself.

The J. Geils Band: Love Stinks (EMI-America). Best title of the year. "I been through diamonds/ I been through minks/I been through it all/ Love stinks" is good cautionary advice for a heady season. It's not Sir John Suckling, but it sure beats Seger's pastilles about star-crossed lovers and drip-dry romances. The J. Geils Band, like Seger, has a hard r & b foundation, but, unlike Seger, they are not going overripe. This is a good-times record that makes no apologies for its frivolity, comes off fresh, wild and goofy --like a recital by a bunch of hubcap thieves who just graduated from the Famous Comedians School.

Billy Joel: Glass Houses (Columbia).

Stung by his success with what the music biz still calls "middle-of-the-road" audiences, Billy Joel, an excellent balladeer and misplaced Broadway composer, set out to make an album that rocked harder and hung tougher. Although one of the tunes here is called It 's Still Rock and Roll to Me, the music sounds like Broadway without a book, and the lyrics are full of the backhand arrogance that Joel mistakes for true rock spirit. Midway through Side 2, Billy backs off a little and decides to flash his cosmopolitan credentials by trying a lyric in French. He isn't fluent in that language either.

Frank Sinatra: Trilogy (Reprise). Well, yes, he is weatherbeaten, and there is some rust in the pipes. Little relevance, less matter. Frank Sinatra gargling would still make most other pop singers sound like ventriloquists or, in some cases, their dummies. Trilogy is a rather unwieldy three-record set in which Ol' Blue Eyes explores the past, the present and the future. Each of the three sections carries a cumbersome subtitle (one is called Reflections on the Future in Three Tenses), but Sinatra checks this kind of weight at the door. There are some fine passes at old favorites (My Shining Hour, More Than You Know); some comfortable negotiating with contemporary material, including New York, New York, Billy Joel's Just the Way You Are (pay a little attention here, Billy); and, astonishingly, a beautiful rendition of Jimmy Webb's Mac Arthur Park, which Sinatra has built up simply by scaling down the psychedelic reveries (imagine him singing "Someone left the cake out in the rain") and letting a shimmering love song stand plain and perfect. The third record of the set is a Gordon Jenkins orchestral fantasia about things to come. It is entirely dispensable. For Frank Sinatra, the future is now.

Pete Townshend: Empty Glass (Atco). A diary of open-throttle intensity with no idling speed. Townshend, taking his second solo shot without the Who, cuts loose with ten songs that are like rounds of some unarmed psychic combat. I Am an Animal is a saw-toothed bit of self-mockery and self-appraisal, Let My Love Open the Door and A Little Is Enough love songs with a spiritual finish and a nice carnal edge, Rough Boys a terrific street anthem, and the title cut an elaborate meditation on musical survivors and musical pretenders. "I've been there and gone there/ I've lived there and bummed there/ I've spilled there, I gave there/" Townshend sings, and there are few rock musicians who can make that kind of claim and make it stick, fewer yet who can do it with such a feverish beauty. There can be no question: Townshend is one of the true life forces of rock music. Empty Glass is a promise fulfilled and renewed, most likely in perpetuity.

Jay Cocks

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