The Second Coming

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2001-06-25 rating:
This has to be the most clinically challenged album I know
This is a truly odd CD. Napoleon XIV drifts from childhood at 43 to near psychosis, with perhaps the sanest track on the entire album being a hymn to the redemptive qualities of Iowa pot ("I owe a lot/To Iowa pot/And I don't mean Iowa corn"). We are taken to places in which the nuts hunt the squirrels, and in which the girl who pre-empted the psychosis from which most of the tracks seem to derive pops up repeatedly, in various forms:on one, she is a photograph on the wall - unfortunately, being as how she's gone, the photo transmorgrifies into a window, and the song peters out in a shower of broken glass and the thud of a falling body. In the single "They're coming to take me away", and its sequel, "They're coming to get me again", she's a demon, albeit one whom Napoleon apparently put in a cage - which he cleaned. I actually played the album to two friends of mine, both of whom are psychiatric nurses. By the end, both of them firmly believed that the artist must have spent time in an asylum (the reference to the way straps do up in a strait jacket is a bit too specific for comfort). Not only that, but both arrived at a diagnosis: the artist is a manic depressive, just entering the manic phase. Whether or not this is factually true, it is a testament to the album's madcap volatility, underpinned by obsessively structured lyrics. If you're a fan of Syd Barrett's bizarre cocktails of nursery rhyme and menace, you'll enjoy tracks like "Little Red Tricycle" ("Thirty days hath Septober,/April May and no wonder/All the rest have peanut butter/All except my dear grandmother ..."), in which the rhyme and rhythm structures play out with the intricacy and demoniac attention to detail of "Bike". Buy this album. But if you have a friend you're worried about, don't let him listen to it. And don't listen to it if you're feeling fragile: you too could become a prey to Dr Psyche the Cut-Rate Head-Shrinker.

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