“She’s Heaven,” the first song on the long-awaited White Soul album by the Chicago group Green, is a striking beginning. Lyrically, it’s a trademark tale from leader Jeff Lescher, a mix of obsessive desire and rampant self-loathing: “I know she’s an angel / And I know I’m a fool,” he sings.
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And it’s only the intro for White Soul, recorded more than a year ago and released last year overseas on the Dutch label Megadisc. Now White Soul and a new, companion EP, Bittersweet, are available here, together on CD from the sardonically named Widely Distributed Records. Taken together, the records represent the most ambitious, accomplished work by a Chicago artist at least since Cheap Trick’s In Color, and maybe since Muddy Waters recorded “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” (Yeah, I know Cheap Trick’s from Rockford; I’m generalizing.) While Lescher’s personal scruffiness and do-it-yourself ethos derive in part from punk, his music is a grand amalgam of the rock, pop, and soul that made up the classic music of a generation or two’s childhood. It’s a redolent olio of the Beatles, the Kinks, Smokey Robinson, and the Troggs, maybe, or David Bowie. Without being imitative (a Green tendency in the past), the songs on White Soul are joyful, forward-looking structures built on a lovingly acknowledged foundation; the only other mainstream artist working in similarly hallowed ground is Prince. So while Lescher’s “Monique Monique” does sound as if it was recorded just before “If I Fell” on the Beatles’ Something New, at the same time, if his “Night After Night” had been on the last Prince album, critics would have creamed their jeans over it. Lescher is that good.
Green, formed in 1984, has always been a Lescher vehicle with a shifting lineup. (The current version includes bang-up drummer Mosher, bassist Clay Tomasek, and a new guitarist, Mike Jarvis, late of Milwaukee’s the Blow Pops.) The band’s first record, a seven-inch EP called The Name of This Band Is Green, contained the boisterous statement of intent “Gotta Get a Record Out.” A first album called Green and 1987’s Elaine MacKenzie followed, both manic and fun but ultimately derivative; Lescher’s supple voice roams through songs that sound like a bunch of covers from the Kinks, the Pretty Things, the Hollies, the Rolling Stones, and the Faces. That in itself is fairly awe-inspiring, but in retrospect the arrangements and even the songs’ themes–“She’s an Addiction,” for example–sound received.
Neither White Soul nor Bittersweet are all seriousness: The former features a goofy tale of romantic pratfalls, “I’m Not Giving Up,” and former Green bassist Ken Kurson’s supersonic “My Sister Jane.” And just as the CD slips to a close, Bittersweet drops in a final tour de force: “The Record Company Song,” a brutal but still heavily romanticized epic, a sort of anatomy of a hit, that wheels through about four different musical genres in as many minutes:
The singer goes with the company’s advice and finds himself with a hit (“It sounds like all the shit on the radio”); but behind him, the group hollers, “Let’s take rock and roll back / From the record companies / Give it back to the kids.” “Now what do I do, sir?” wails Lescher. It’s a hugely funny tale that could only have been written by a talented 30-year-old facing something less than immortality. (“It kills Jeff that by the time Paul McCartney was 30 he’d recorded Let It Be,” says a friend.) Does Lescher worry about having turned 30? “Only in the sense that to continue to be unsuccessful might begin to look like we’re flogging a dead horse,” he says.
