JULIETTE LEWIS - Terra Incognita

Juliette Lewis is one of those artists who's perennially on tour. If you've ever glanced at her Twitter, you'll have noticed how little she's stopped since releasing her first album back in 2005.

And yet she's managed to find the time to part ways with Hassle Records and sign with The End, finally give "The Licks" (a technically mediocre and musically insipid band) their marching orders, write this new album on her own, and release it solely under her own name.

It's surely no coincidence that the album is titled "Terra Incognita": essentially without her usual stage cohorts, with a new label to satisfy, a new producer (thank heavens!) to work with, it's only natural that Lewis finds herself disoriented in an arid territory where strange tricks of light can make even the most colorful hummingbird look like a menacing crow.

In this desolate stretch, Juliette stays still and places her full trust in the magic that her producer of the moment (this time none other than Omar Rodriguez-Lopez) manages to conjure up.

With Rodriguez-Lopez, Lewis can finally benefit from a sound that's bold, full-bodied and full of blood, and a technically solid band to create and support it. Unfortunately that's not enough to rescue songs that have little character and even less to say.

The record opens superbly with "Intro", a richly evocative track in which the guitar immediately grabs our attention while Lewis's filtered voice begins to tell us the gripping story of a murder. Everything about it is perfect: the tension that draws us in, the bewilderment that bewitches us. We want the whole album to sound like this, and we want to know how the story ends. Those hopes are dashed the moment the plot continues into "Noche Sin Fin".

"Hard Lovin' Woman" is interesting, a dry, rasping blues number that Lewis fails to give the weight it demands: you can hear echoes of Janis Joplin's lessons, but those peaks only ever appear in the distance.

The driving "Fantasy Bar" is lovely, perhaps because it doesn't aim for much beyond being catchy enough for radio play.

All in all, "Terra Incognita" does contain a few decent tracks.

So what is it that makes a Juliette Lewis record not a good record? Maybe it's the name. Maybe I'm a victim of prejudice: maybe an actress who's been nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, an Emmy, and a slew of other awards, and who has actually won plenty of them including the Pasinetti Award at the Venice Film Festival, simply can't also be a singer and songwriter worth taking seriously. So I listen to the record again and realize that even if I close my eyes and force myself not to think of her as Juliette Lewis, this record still fails to excite me.

The truth is that Juliette Lewis's records are missing something. They're missing Inspiration; Juliette Lewis is missing a Muse, and she goes looking for guidance in producers who do what they can. And yet Lewis might somehow be on the right track, because "Ghost" — even if it could use some work, especially in its opening — is a hate song that picks up the dark atmosphere of "Intro" and in some ways recalls "Subway Song", and to sing such words of hatred, Juliette must really have it in for someone. So what's missing from the other songs? The Muse. Even if she's an evil Muse. Or a divine one: after all, "All Is For God" makes us wonder, "Why can't the other tracks be like this too?"

Then we realize that Omar Rodriguez-Lopez does a good job (better on some tracks than others: on "Uh Huh" he probably took the day off), but Lewis fails to bring out the best in him.

It's hardly surprising, after the swagger of "You're Speaking My Language" (from which we didn't exactly walk away with much, especially the chorus of "Got Love to Kill", which was the smartest thing around that season: "Hey hey, oh oh – Hey hey, oh oh oh – Hey hey, oh oh oh, oh aw") and the flimsiness of "Four On The Floor" (a record whose sole purpose was housing "Inside The Cage", to which I awarded the "2006 Song on Loop" prize, an album almost as ugly as its cover, made worse if possible by the production of an inept musician like Dave Grohl), that not much was expected from this third record, and not much is what we end up hearing. Juliette Lewis is perhaps too used to letting others take the wheel, and what emerges from these records is precisely the lack of any distinctly personal path or growth.

If Juliette doesn't hit her peak in the studio, her energy explodes on stage. In Milan in the second half of November. I've already got my ticket. Now I'm publishing this review and going off to chain myself to the barricades. Maybe remember to bring me some water and a sandwich. Thanks.

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27/08/2009