Review Summary: Ginger's second double-album avoids the usual pitfalls of the break-up album, the self-pitying ballads and the cheese, while still blaming the bitch for everything
Fresh from the most recent dissolution of The Wildhearts, frontman Ginger embarked on a solo career, the first time he’d attempted to release material under his own name, though each of his bands since and including The Wildhearts could arguably be described as such. Ginger’s second solo album, his second double-LP solo album, was due also to be his second original album of 2005, along with the live double-LP
Grievous Acoustic Behaviour. Distribution problems caused the release of (the grammatically incorrect)
Valor del Corazon to be pushed back to January, though many outlets had copies on order for months afterwards (mine didn’t arrive until March), perhaps because he was already working virulently on the follow-up,
Yoni, which has just been released.
The speed at which Ginger creates music these days is made all the more impressive by the personal troubles he’s had to face. The split with his wife in the months before the album was written was far from amicable, and wasn't helped by his heroin addiction, a habit he’s thankfully managed to kick since. At the same time, he had no shortage of, for lack of a better word,
inspiration- the majority of the themes presented on the album are either based on one, the other, or both of these subjects, and document the full range of emotions experienced by a recovering addict and a jilted lover. And where better to record such an album than Willy Nelson’s home studio in Austin, Texas?
The location (and company) may go some way toward explaining one of the highlights of the album. ‘Mother City’ is Ginger’s own tribute to New York, a city that captured his imagination as a child and served as an alternate reality (hell, I’m half his age and New York
was America when I was growing up) or, as he describes it, and alternate mother. Ginger sings
“New York City, she’s my rock n’ roll” to the tune of a KISS-like guitar riff and a Dolls-like blues beat, closing with the question,
“[I was] 36 years old when they tried to beat you down, who do they think they’re messing around?”
Elsewhere, however, the album is anything but nostalgic. The sweet melodies remain (thankfully he didn’t all
In Utero on us, though it’d be forgivable) and
Valor del Corazon may well be the most melodic record of Ginger’s career; he’s been heading further in the pop direction with each of his releases since The Wildhearts last record
The Wildhearts Must Be Destroyed, trading in the heaviest of his riffs for blues-based melodies and introducing a number of new instruments and timbres to his armoury, as exemplified by the ‘Hello Goodbye’-aping instrumental ‘G.T.T.’
Of the two discs, the first is the shorter, the more immediate and, ultimately, the better. It kicks off with a short burst of fury in ‘Ugly,’ a Therapy?-like metal number that sticks out, even over eighty minutes, as the most instrumentally heavy song on the album. The lyrics (there’s only two lines) are aimed squarely as his destructive substance habit, as he shouts
“You make me feel as ugly as sin,” while the piano ballad closer ‘The Man Who Cheated Death’ is one of a number of tracks. Here Ginger reproaches his addiction, insisting he’s stronger than it, for his own benefit more than anyone else’s, as he does in ‘This Is Only a Problem.’
Disc two is significantly longer than the first and, unfortunately, it’s also where a degree of
lag begins to set in. ‘Change’ and ‘Something To Believe In’ are forgettable ballads, ‘Bulb’ boasts impressive Slash-style lead guitar but a comparatively weak vocal melody, while ‘Your Mouth’ is an unimpressive piano-lounge number that enjoys its only real high-point when it borrows the melody from ‘My Way.’ On the other hand, it’s also got ‘L.O.V.E.’ (short for
“Loneliness Orchestrated Vaginal Empowerment” or “my lady f
ucked me over” in everyday English) and ‘Keep It Cool,’ the former a jazz and metal-influenced mini-epic with multi-tracked female lead vocals and the latter could be an outtake from the
… Must Be Destroyed sessions and is also augmented by female chorus vocals.
The undoubted highlight of the album as a whole, however, is the six-minute ‘Drinking In The Daytime,’ a quintessential Wildhearts track with more unique riffs than most groups get through on an album and a stunning dynamic between the bottleneck blues intro/outro and the hard-hitting metal body. The lyrics deal with the difficulties of a relationship on the rocks, as Ginger sings
“[I’m] drinking in the daytime, something that I’m doing ‘cause there’s a hurricane brewing,” while ‘The Drunken Lord of Everything’ is defiant after the break-up, singing,
“The papers will not hear about another man turning blue.”
Unsurprisingly, given that it’s double album,
Valor del Corazon’s main problem is that not enough material has been left
off the album, or rather left off the second disc. But it’s understandable that he may not have wanted to leave certain songs out, as they expressed feelings that otherwise would have left the record incomplete. Of course it will never be complete, as Ginger clearly hasn’t got around to apportioning any of the blame for his failed relationship to himself, but as a snapshot of a moment in history, it’s difficult to imagine a more honest, emotional and hard rocking account.
Selected tracks available at: http://www.myspace.com/silverginger
