A Rock In The Weary Land

08/29/2001 9:39 PM, LAUNCH
Rob O'Connor

Mike Scott is one of those impossibly pompous SOBs who walks the line between greatness and garbage so carelessly that he's landed in both camps frequently and without warning throughout his near 20-year career. Just when you figure he's down for the count, he comes back with an album as majestic and epic as this one. Lyrically, he still sounds like he's delivering the sermon from the mount ("We Are Jonah"???), but this time he's slammed the meters so far in the analog red that they bleed with glorious distortion and achieve the grandiose scale to match his massive delusions. Positively Wagnerian in its ability to crush and maim, Rock is mostly Scott with a rag-tag collection of musicians out to psychedelicize the world (even Julian Cope's Thighpaulsandra contributes Mellotron, synths, and mock trumpet). Scott'll never be as fun as Cope, but at least he's not the born-again dud from a few years back.