Daryl Hall - Sacred Songs

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Music reviews of Sacred Songs

Music Review: Overlooked, Underheard Near Masterpiece
Rating: 5 Stars

But I don't think this album will do much for Hall's typical fan base, and instead recommend it as a "must-have" for anyone who has followed Robert Fripp's career. In 1977 - 79 he produced/recorded three albums meant to represent a trilogy, one essentially a solo album with various friends as quest musicians/vocalists [Hall among them], another a more or less straight forward production of Peter Gabriel's second solo album, and then this animal. While Fripp's Exposure is probably the most solid offering of the three, Sacred Songs kinds of more suggests to me what a 1978 era King Crimson might have sounded like with Hall on vocals and Fripp engaged in his little sound experiments. It certainly lacks the frenetic gloom of the last "early period" Crimson album, Red, but feels like more of an ensemble piece than either Exposure or Gabriel II, with Fripp's guitar experiments as the fulcrum around which Hall weaves his tapestry of pop sentimentalities.

And the combination is strangely effective ... the album gets off to a slow start with "Sacred Songs", which plays out as sort of a pop-accessible introduction to the tangents they take off on after it is out of the way. "Something in 4/4 Time" might be perhaps Fripp's best work as a session musician this side of David Bowie's Scary Monsters ... the song swells to a wall of polyrhythmic crescendos that could only have been made by one person. "Babs and Babs" is a fascinating compromise between Hall's straightforward songwriting style and Fripp's steadfast determination to use the album as a demonstration of his then new Frippertronics tape loop devices ... at points when a lesser artist would have devolved into a hollow, dime a dozen solo, Fripp builds loop upon loop of harmonizing sounds and then pulls the rug from underneath the listener, cutting back to Hall's singing and then ending the piece by fading the rock band into an "Urban Landscape" Frippertronics segment .... And then BAM! we kick into a high tempo Fripp/metal variation on one of his Exposure tracks, and if you listen carefully you can hear a chair get shoved out of the way as Hall stands up to belt out one of the most observed songs about New York City I have ever heard.

The second side kind of pales in comparison, with sing song sweeties and harmonized Fripperies that are more reminiscent of Hall's work with the dreaded John Oates. But one track stands out in particular -- "Don't Leave me Alone With Her" has not only a fascinating lyrical standpoint but features a classic King Crimson effect in how the song fades out towards the end and then roars back to life for a final burst of energy. Daryl Hall as Album Oriented Rock? You bet -- this could have been as big of a hit as Boston if the album hadn't been shelved until 1980 and then underpromoted. Too bad.

The sound quality of the CD is first rate and true to the original vinyl mix but with greater clarity, especially in the upper ranges. There is very little tape hiss, and the song mixes are the same as on the record [I have always been annoyed by how Fripp has "remixed" his LP's for CD 'definitive editions', which more often than not are subtly different from the original mixes. Perhaps we are lucky that Fripp was not actively involved with the remastering of this pressing.

Finally, the two "bonus songs" are interesting, but sort of throwaways. The version of "You Burn Me Up" sounds like what migh have been intended as a single version but doesn't really offer any new insights, and the version of "North Star" is lovely, but why include it? Perhaps at the insistence of Mr. Fripp to help sell some copies of his CD, since these two tracks are easily the least interesting things on it. He's a schemer like that.

All in all it's a first rate CD issuing of a sadly overlooked work of inspiration. Grab it before it goes out of print, again.

Description of Sacred Songs

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