Search - Peter Ivers :: Terminal Love

Quirky, off-kilter mid-70s progressive pop

Ferrara Brain Pan | San Francisco CA | 09/02/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"It's great that all this Peter Ivers music is coming out now, in the wake of the biography that was published last year (In Heaven... by Josh Frank, see my review here on Amazon). I have yet to hear the previously unreleased albums that have been issued now for the first time, but I'm familiar with his two mid-70s Warner Bros albums, having bought both of them back in their original LP release.



This one here is the one that first made me aware of his music, when I heard a couple songs from the record played repeatedly on Boston underground FM radio at the time of release. Ivers' voice is like no other, one of those very distinctive upper-register male rock singer voices that sounds ridiculous and/or charmingly attractive, depending on your point of view (think of Robert Wyatt, Comus' Roger Wootten, or the singer for Pavlov's Dog if you want other examples). His vocal style is well suited to the type of humorous and wittily suggestive lyrics he writes and sings, and most of the songwriting on this is quite inventive: more or less sticking to verse-chorus pop forms, but employing very odd arrangements. Buell Neidlinger produced this album and played bass, and the instrumentation and harmonic voicings tend toward the dissonant and unsettling, with growling, squawking baritone sax, eerie violin, and Ivers' incomparable harmonica style. It's all a bit more mainstream in presentation than his first album (this is technically his third recording, but it was only the second one to be released, since his second album was shelved by the label after his first one bombed commercially). Nevertheless, if Peter was expecting this to be the record to hit it big with all the teenyboppers and make him a star (as is claimed in Josh Frank's biography), you have to wonder if he was naively optimistic or delusional. This is a strange record, indeed. And probably quite ahead of its time, since a bizarre pop record like this would likely have gained far greater acceptance ten years later if it had been a New Wave or post-punk release in the milieu of Lemon Kittens and the Slits. It's too bad that the commercial failure of this album led Ivers to further homogenize his sound in pursuit of a mainstream appeal, especially considering that in the years following this 1974 release the marketplace began opening up somewhat toward more strange and unusual artists. In his music career, as in his death, Peter was sadly just not in the right place at the right time. This album is one of his best, though, and for years you could only find it in expensive Japanese CD reissues or used vinyl on eBay. Give it a listen if you like bands like early Sparks, Slapp Happy, and late-period Comus."