It can't have been easy collating Streetcore after Joe Strummer died. One can only imagine the all-pervading sense of sadness, the ghosts and memories that haunted the control room. Yet the Mescaleros' Scott Shields and Martin Slattery have done a fine job, keeping their own egos at bay, allowing the great man to take centre-stage and reveal that he had rediscovered some form. "Get Down Moses" is a deep, dubby Clash special, with Strummer testifying to his undying love of youth and the outcast and a big keyboard swirling overhead. "Long Shadow" is a hobo folk song, "Ramshackle Day Parade" crosses Bob Dylan and the Beatles and "Arms Aloft" is a pumped-up, slightly psychedelic rocker. Best, though, are the moments when Strummer goes quiet. Bob Marley's "Redemption Song", recorded with Rick Rubin and given a provocative Irish flavour, ideally suits the man's heartfelt vocals and freedom-fighting reputation. "Silver and Gold", another cover, wherein Strummer considers the positive actions he must take before age overcomes him, is made cruelly poignant by circumstances. Yet this is not a sad album; rather, it's happy proof that musicians can still ride the freight train, not simply the gravy-train, that they can still mean something. It's an important lesson to relearn, and there was never a finer teacher. --Dominic Wills
Joe Strummer
Streetcore [with The Mescaleros]
[Epitaph; 2003]
Rating: 6.9
The only thing more potentially demonizing for a music critic to cover than charity records are posthumous albums from once legendary musicians. Most of the time these records either pale in comparison to the quality of the artists' earlier work, or prove to be incredibly sentimental mortality-pondering affairs. Furthermore, given that the artist is dead, picking out the weaknesses of their final contributions to the music listening public at large seems rather heartless, and more to the point, unnecessary. The job of the music critic is already unfairly viewed as a predatory position; no reviewer in his right mind would want to be accused of picking on the dead.
The way most critics seem to go about reconciling this rather unfortunate occupational hazard is by dishing out undeserved laudatory acclaim for these predominantly lackluster releases, which allows a perfect in for critics to eulogize about the great contributions that so-and-so musician once doled out to the world. Most importantly, though, this critical approach unfairly presents a very illusory and all-too tidy closure to creative lives that rarely seem to get wrapped up in such convenient Hollywood endings.
It's in this mired context that Joe Strummer's fourth and regrettably final solo release (excluding the Walker soundtrack), Streetcore, presents itself as somewhat of a posthumous album oddity. Given that Strummer's death last December from a heart attack came entirely unexpected, Streetcore brims with previously untraveled aesthetic directions, bittersweetly forward-gazing lyrics, and most of all, the overwhelmingly celebratory insurgence of rock 'n' roll-- decidedly not the trappings of pondering mortality. Ironically, it's a record that refuses to acknowledge endings; the album's aesthetics are an inconsistent but moving string of conflated genres, including rocksteady, dub, blues and folk, that thankfully avoid the hokey world-music-influenced pitfalls of Strummer's previous solo outings. So, while the record fails at living up to the hyperbolic critical proclamations of London Calling's second coming, it does make for a pretty decent, if somewhat unexpected, sweat-soaked finale for The Clash's legendary golden boy.
The record opens with its greatest moment; "Coma Girl" is a wildly exuberant blast of telecaster majesty whose seething, stripped-down production (courtesy of Mescaleros Martin Slattery and Scott Shield) provides a vital injection of youthful crunch. Though a fairly standard 4/4 rocker in spirit, it manages to equally evoke Allen Ginsberg, Jimmy Cliff, and the Rolling Stones. The nostalgic romp "Arms Aloft" offers a possible explanation for Strummer's brazen return to his rock 'n' roll roots: Over a din of sneering guitar licks and rollicking percussion, he finds solace in his glory days with a fist-raising chorus whose mantra goes, "Just when you were thinkin' of slinkin' down, I'm gonna pull you up, I'm gonna pull you down/ May I remind you of that scene, we were arms aloft in Aberdeen!"
One of the most surprising aspects of Streetcore is that whenever Strummer indulges these Jamaican influences, the results are less than noteworthy-- which is saying something for a man who historically helped merge the worlds of reggae and punk rock. For instance, the unabashedly rocksteady backdrop of the anti-capitalist plea "Get Down Moses" comes off more like No Doubt than Rockers, even while Strummer drops some well-intended lyrical musings. The instrumental "Midnight Jam" reaches for the echoing, hallucinatory highs of dub, but instead presents a laconic guitar vamp, startlingly bereft of any murky reverberated beauty. And then there's the worst offender: Strummer's cover of the Bob Marley classic "Redemption Song". It pains me to say that this track-- the only one not drawn from the original album sessions, and included by Strummer's widow Luce for what are most likely sentimental reasons-- verges on comedy. The song may have been recorded with the best of intentions as an ideal showcase for Strummer's love of reggae and folk, but Rick Rubin's spare production only leaves room for Strummer to make a fool of himself affecting a thick Marley patois for lines like, "Oh, pirates, yes they rob I."
If Streetcore fails to serve as the groundbreaking solo manifesto that critics had hoped for, it's of no consequence. The real marvel of the album is that it serves as an ideal document of one of rock's greatest, most diverse individuals. As Joe hauntingly sings on the record's sublime country-flavored closer, a cover of a Bobby Charles tune retitled "Silver and Gold": "I'm gonna go out dancing, I'm gonna see the city lights/ And do everything silver and gold, I got to hurry up before I get too old." Streetcore is proof that Strummer indeed lived it up "silver and gold" on record, and probably still is wherever he might be today.
-Hartley Goldstein, December 09, 2003
Review by Thom Jurek
Like Muddy Waters, whose final albums were among the best in his catalog, Streetcore by Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros (Martin Slattery, Tymon Dogg, Simon Stanford, and Scott Shields) sends Strummer into rock & roll heaven a roaring, laughing, snarling lion. Unlike the previous Mescaleros outings, which were rooted in various world and folk musics and tempered by rock, Streetcore anchors itself in rock & roll and deadly heavy reggae (and for anyone who needs a reminder, Strummer's former band, the Clash, played reggae in the late '70s and early '80s better than a lot of that genre's artists). From "Coma Girl," the album's opening track, there is no doubt that Strummer hits bedrock with this fusion of garage band wail and dread beat. "Coma Girl" uses lean and mean guitars and Phil Spector's 1960s girl groups, then crosses them rhythmically with rocksteady basslines and enormous backbeats. Yes, it does sound like a lost cut from London Calling. A love song for a wasted mascot who flirts and inspires the various metaphorical socio-politcal gangs that are trying to rule the dawn of the end of the world, Strummer and band -- the Mescaleros, with their killer rhythms and over-the-red-line guitar and keyboard lines are as tight and tough as anybody out there -- truly find the flowers borne by suicide divas in the dustbin of the apocalypse. Writing like Bob Dylan at his most expressionistic, Strummer's urgency is beyond the warnings of the Clash's London Calling or Sandinista! Strummer's protagonist is living on the nether edge of reality, where the worst has already happened, he can only celebrate what's left in the ahses of civilization.
Listening to the crunchy rocksteady thunder in "Go Down Moses," with its monstrous dubbed-out bass and lyrics about the sellout of the world wholesale, listeners can hear Strummer laughing in the face of all the darkness multinationalism can muster. "Long Shadow," with its minor-key architecture and acoustic guitars played in pure Americana rambling style, was written for Johnny Cash but never recorded. Its protagonist crosses deserts and rivers; he haunts the places of desolation in order to speak with the voice of the Storyteller. The song's style and spirit evokes the ghost of Cisco Houston as Strummer sings: "I'll tell you one thing that I know/You don't face your demons down, you gotta grapple with 'em Jack/And pin 'em to the ground...And I hear punks talk of anarchy/I hear hobos on the railroads/I hear mutterings on the chain gangs/It was those men who built the roads/And if you put it all together/You didn't even once relent/You cast a long shadow/And that is your testament...." Other rockers include the burning revolution drama of "Arms Aloft," with a refrain that is among the most anthemic and raucous Strummer ever wrote. With wah-wah guitars, distorted bass, boombastic drums and cymbals, it is the hardest rocking track on the set. Also strong are the searing "All in a Day," with its razor-wire Telecaster stomp, and the medium to slow heaviness of "Burnin' Streets." There are two covers on Streetcore. First is a deeply moving reading of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song," played acoustically by Strummer, Smokey Hormel, and Benmont Tench, and produced by Rick Rubin. This is the only cut that the Mescaleros don't appear on; it wasn't recorded for this set but is included by Luce (Strummer's widow) and the band as a hinge piece for the front and back of the album to hang on, and it works gloriously. The other is the closer, a cover of the Bobby Charles' classic "Before I Grow Too Old," retitled here as "Silver and Gold." It's a barroom song played in elegiac, Anglo country style -- think of the Mekons on Fear and Whiskey. Strummer's last line in the song is, "I've got to hurry up before I grow too old," before he speaks to us in his grainy Cockney voice, "OK, that's a take." It's almost as unbearable as it is unforgettable. Streetcore is the sound of Joe Strummer hitting his stride with his own band on his terms both lyrically and musically. The fact that this is a final album for Strummer is beside the point; this is one of the best rock & roll albums of 2003, and truly the finest, most cohesive work he did after London Calling.
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