MIDNIGHT ALLEYS ROAM

The Changeling
Pretty bold move to start with this, knowing they had the next song in all its charming obviousness at their disposal. You look at the album cover and see the once-leonine face that was thrust to the fore on the cover of the debut, now puffy and hirsute, keeping a physically lower profile than its bandmates, only four years on. And you understand the attraction to the concept of change. Probably worthwhile to keep in mind the three definitions of "changeling" in Webster's:
1. Turncoat.
2. A child secretly changed for another in infancy.
3. Imbecile.
Somewhere deep in his heart, Jim probably thought he was a little bit of all three...

Love Her Madly
Charmingly obvious, or didn't you hear?

Been Down So Long
They work up a good blues froth here, straightforward and gruff.

Cars Hiss By My Window
Slow as molasses, and relevant mostly because it provides a thematic lead in to the epic and propulsive...

L.A. Woman
One of their best. Even the leaden anagramming that it builds to kind of tickles-- it's self-mythologizing that doesn't take itself too seriously. The whole thing moves like L.A., with all the sights/sounds/smells of L.A.

L'America
Bites My Generation's "fade away" with its "find yourself" but it's still kind of amusing. I like how it flips between menacing and merry-go-round...

Hyacinth House
The "I need a brand new friend" stuff is touching and convincing, and I genuinely buy that this is not a pantomime of real emotion. But "I see the bathroom is clear"? Yeah, I could've done without that...

Crawlin' King Snake
FF

The W.A.S.P.
I liked this even less when Bono called it Bullet the Blue Sky. To be fair, this doesn't leave quite the scorched earth on L.A. Woman that Bono's rap does on The Joshua Tree-- the music is intricate enough to hold your attention, and some of the lyrics are well turned, if a bit well marinated.

Riders on the Storm
Haunting, in retrospect, kind of like All Apologies. Not just because both end their respective groups' final albums, but because they seem to carry markers of their leaders' deaths. They also carry clear markers of their leaders' weariness, which plays out here in some pathetic lyrics (the "dog without a bone" and "his brain is squirmin' like a toad" patches in particular). And so to bed, perchance to dream...

I'll wrap this all up on Monday.